Routledge Handbook of Persian Gulf Politics 0367193736, 9780367193737

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ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF

PERSIAN GULF POLITICS 

The Routledge Handbook of Persian Gulf Politics provides a comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of Persian Gulf politics, history, economics, and society. The volume begins its examination of Ottoman rule in the Arabian Peninsula, exploring other dimensions of the region’s history up until and after independence in the 1960s and 1970s. Featuring scholars from a range of disciplines, the book demonstrates how the Persian Gulf’s current, complex politics is a product of interwoven dynamics rooted in historical developments and memories, profound social, cultural, and economic changes underway since the 1980s and the 1990s, and inter-state and international relations among both regional actors and between them and the rest of the world. The book comprises a total of 36 individual chapters divided into the following six sections: • • • • • •

Historical Context Society and Culture Economic Development Domestic Politics Regional Security Dynamics The Persian Gulf and the World

Examining the Persian Gulf’s increasing importance in regional politics, diplomacy, economics, and security issues, the volume is a valuable resource for scholars, students, and policy makers interested in political science, history, Gulf studies, and the Middle East. Mehran Kamrava is Professor of Government at Georgetown University in Qatar. His books include A Concise History of Revolution (2020), Troubled Waters: Insecurity in the Persian Gulf (2018), Inside the Arab State (2018), The Impossibility of Palestine: History, Geography, and the Road Ahead (2016), and Qatar: Small State, Big Politics (2015).

‘In this magisterial volume, Mehran Kamrava brings together some of the world’s foremost experts to shed light on one of the most important – yet widely misunder­ stood – regions of the world. Interrogating dislocations in political, economic, social, geopolitical and cultural realms, this is required reading for anyone desiring a better understanding of the Persian Gulf.’ Simon Mabon, Director of the Richardson Institute, Lancaster University, UK

‘Mehran Kamrava has assembled a sterling list of authors, a mix of veteran analysts and younger academics who are fresh from the field. The volume helps to define the study of the politics of the Persian Gulf region for some time.’ F. Gregory Gause, III, Head of International Affairs Department, The Bush School, Texas A&M University, USA

Routledge Handbook of  

PeRsian gulf Politics  

Edited by Mehran Kamrava

Published in collaboration with

Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS),

Georgetown University in Qatar 

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Mehran Kamrava; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Mehran Kamrava to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Kamrava, Mehran, 1964- editor. 

Title: Routledge handbook of Persian Gulf politics / Mehran Kamrava. 

Other titles: Handbook of Persian Gulf politics 

Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. |

Includes bibliographical references and index. 

Identifiers: LCCN 2020000074 (print) | LCCN 2020000075 (ebook) |

ISBN 9780367193737 (hardback) | ISBN 9780429510656 (adobe pdf) |

ISBN 9780429514081 (epub) | ISBN 9780429517518 (mobi) 

Subjects: LCSH: Security, International–Persian Gulf Region. | Persian Gulf

Region–History. | Persian Gulf Region–Politics and government. | Persian Gulf

Region–Social conditions. | Persian Gulf Region–Economic conditions. | Persian Gulf

Region–Foreign relations. 

Classification: LCC DS326 .R685 2020 (print) | LCC DS326 (ebook) |

DDC 953–dc23 

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020000074  

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020000075  

ISBN: 978-0-367-19373-7 (hbk) 

ISBN: 978-0-429-20198-1 (ebk) 

Typeset in Bembo 

by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear

contents 

List of figures List of tables Notes on contributors Acknowledgments

ix x xi xvii

1 Politics in the Persian Gulf: an overview Mehran Kamrava Part I

Historical context

1

5

2 The Ottomans in the Arabian Peninsula Aiza Khan 3 The Persian Gulf in the pre-protectorate period: 1790–1853 Allen James Fromherz 4 Saudi Arabia and the 1744 alliance between the Al Saud and the Al-Sheikh: a legitimizing and enduring union Joseph A. Kéchichian 5 Britain’s presence in the Persian Gulf, 1617–2019 W. Taylor Fain 6 The states of the Persian Gulf: from protectorates to independent countries Lucy M. Abbott v

7 17

25 35

48

Contents Part II

Society and culture

55

7 Modernity and the Arab Gulf states: the politics of heritage, memory, and forgetting Farah Al-Nakib

57

8 Evolving family patterns in the Arabian Peninsula Amira Sonbol

83

9 Migrant urbanism in Gulf cities: a reality without vision? Florian Wiedmann

99

10 Social division in Iraq: Ahl al-Shiqāq wa-l-Nifāq? Fanar Haddad

112

11 Sectarianism in the Gulf monarchies: regional and domestic factors of Sunni–Shiʿi tensions Laurence Louër

127

12 Women’s education, women’s work, and womanhood in the Gulf’s oil monarchies Mandana E. Limbert

142

13 Oil for art’s sake: art and culture in the GCC Suzi Mirgani Part III

151

Economic development

161

14 Rentier political economy in the oil monarchies Jessie Moritz

163

15 Global energy markets and the Persian Gulf Li-Chen Sim

187

16 The emergence and spread of the “Dubai model” in the GCC countries Martin Hvidt

203

17 Labor migration in the Persian Gulf Zahra Babar

216

18 Revisiting the Gulf’s divided labor markets Michael Ewers and Ryan Dicce

232

vi

Contents

19 Working women in the oil monarchies Nawra Al Lawati and Gail J. Buttorff Part IV

248

Domestic politics

263

20 Nationalism in Iran Hamid Ahmadi

265

21 Nationalism in the Persian Gulf’s oil monarchies Jill Crystal

280

22 Charismatic authority in a hybrid state: reading Max Weber and beyond in post-revolutionary Iran Mojtaba Mahdavi

292

23 Political Islam in the Arabian Peninsula Courtney Freer

308

24 Parliamentary politics in Kuwait Clemens Chay

327

25 Political absolutism in the Gulf monarchies Steven Wright

346

26 Royal succession in Saudi Arabia: the rise of Mohammed bin Salman Stig Stenslie

357

Part V

regional security dynamics

367

27 Security in the Persian Gulf Nader Entessar

369

28 Security dilemmas and conflict spirals in the Persian Gulf Fred H. Lawson

382

29 Between anarchy and arms race: a security dilemma in the Persian Gulf Islam Hassan 30 The rise and decline of the Gulf Cooperation Council Kristian Coates Ulrichsen vii

396 416

Contents

31 Saudi–Iranian relations: between identity, ideology, and interest Massaab Al-Aloosy

431

32 The armed forces in post-revolutionary Iran Saeid Golkar

443

Part VI

The Persian Gulf and the world

455

33 The United States and the Persian Gulf: the art of surviving in stormy waters Houchang Hassan-Yari

457

34 The United States and Iran: transcending no man’s land Ghoncheh Tazmini

473

35 Iran–USA relations: challenges and opportunities Gawdat Bahgat

482

36 China in the Persian Gulf: hedging under the US umbrella Jonathan Fulton

492

Select bibliography Index

506 528

viii

figuRes  

0.1 9.1 9.2 14.1 22.1 29.1 29.2 29.3 32.1

Map of the Persian Gulf Construction workers on a building site in Doha The basic demographic structure of urban populations Rentier state characteristics Number of offices and institutions created after 1989 Anarchy, security dilemma, and the arms race Military expenditure (billion US$) by the UAE, Saudi, and Qatar 2002–18 Military expenditure (% of GDP) by the UAE, Saudi, and Qatar 2002–18 The structure of Iran’s armed forces

ix

xviii 

102 

103 

166 

299 

397 

405 

406 

447 

tables  

9.1 14.1 14.2  14.3  16.1  18.1  18.2  18.3  19.1  19.2  24.1  36.1  36.2 

Overall demographic and growth profile in four Gulf states  Rent abundance in the Gulf oil and gas monarchies  Development plans in the GCC Saudi FDI inflows 2013–18 Annual number of GCC nationals reaching working age (twenty-five years)   

in the years before 2030 Gulf labor market indicators Gulf labor force by nationality and employment sector Key Gulf oil and diversification indicators Employed female citizens and non-citizens by work sector, 2016 Unemployment rates, male and female, 2018 The terms of the Kuwaiti National Assembly China–Persian Gulf states trade, 2007–17 COFDI in Persian Gulf states, 2005–17

x

101 

168 

169 

170 

210 

234 

235 

236 

249 

252 

329 

495 

498 

contRibutoRs  

Lucy M. Abbott is Lecturer in Politics and International Relations in the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, UK. She completed her PhD in the School of Gov­ ernment and International Affairs, Durham University, and undertook her post-doctoral work at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. Her work has appeared in Journal of International Political Theory, Democratization, and International Affairs. Hamid Ahmadi is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Tehran. He has held visiting posts at METU in Turkey and Carleton University in Canada. He is the author of a number of books and articles, including, most recently, “The Clash of Nationalisms: Iranian Response to Baku Irredentism,” in Mehran Kamrava (ed.), The Great Game in West Asia (2017) and “Iran and the Arab Spring: Why Iranians did not Follow the Arabs?” Asian Politics and Policy (2013). Massaab Al-Aloosy is an Assistant Professor at the Critical Security Program at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. He received his PhD and MALD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and is the author of The Changing Ideology of Hezbollah (Palgrave 2020). Nawra Al Lawati is an Omani lecturer in the department of Political Science at Sultan Qaboos University. Her research focuses on gender and politics in the Gulf region. Al Lawati holds an MSc in International Political Economy from the London School of Economics and Political Science and is currently pursuing a PhD in Politics at the University of Liverpool (2018–21). Farah Al-Nakib is Assistant Professor of History at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. She received her PhD (2011) and MA (2006) from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. Her book, Kuwait Transformed: A History of Oil and Urban Life, was published by Stanford University Press in 2016. Her current research focuses on cultural memory in Kuwait. Until 2018, she was Director of the Center for Gulf Studies at the American Univer­ sity of Kuwait. Zahra Babar is Associate Director at the Center for International and Regional Studies at Georgetown University in Qatar. She has published several articles and chapters, including xi

Contributors

“Im/Mobile Highly Skilled Migrants in Qatar,” with M. Ewers and N. Khattab, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (2019), “Enduring ‘Contested’ Citizenship in the Gulf Cooperation Council,” The Middle East in Transition: The Centrality of Citizenship (2018), and “The ‘Enemy Within’: Citizenship- Stripping in the Post- Arab Spring GCC,” Middle East Journal (2017). Gawdat Bahgat is Professor of National Security Affairs at the National Defense University’s Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Study. He has published twelve books, including Security and Bilateral Issues between Iran and Its Arab Neighbors (2016), Energy Security in the Gulf (2015), Alternative Energy in the Middle East (2013), Energy Security (2011), International Political Economy (2010), Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in the Middle East (2007), Israel and the Persian Gulf (2006), and American Oil Diplomacy (2003). Gail J. Buttorff is an Instructional Assistant Professor and Co-Director of the Survey Research Institute at the University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs. Her research focuses on electoral politics and gender and female empowerment in the Middle East and GCC. She holds a PhD and MA in political science from the University of Iowa and a BA from New York University. Clemens Chay holds a PhD from Durham University and is currently a Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute. His research focuses on the history and politics of the Gulf states, with a particular emphasis on Kuwait and Oman. His most recent publication is titled “The Dīwāniyya Tradition in Modern Kuwait: An Interlinked Space and Practice,” appearing in the Journal of Arabian Studies.  Jill Crystal is the Curtis O. Liles III Professor of Political Science at Auburn University in the USA. She received her BA from Cornell, and her MA and PhD from Harvard. She has written numerous articles and chapters, and two books on the Gulf: Oil and Politics in the Gulf: Rulers and Merchants in Kuwait and Qatar (1990) and Kuwait: The Transformation of an Oil State (1992). Her research interests include Gulf politics, authoritarianism, policing, and political economy. Ryan Dicce is an Adjunct Professor at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. His research combines international migration and local economic development. He is currently exploring the political, cultural, and human capital elements of the United Arab Emirates’ emerging solar energy industry. Previously, Ryan was a member of a National Science Foundation funded research project on the development of Islamic finance in Bahrain and Malaysia and was a Global Academic Fellow for NYU Abu Dhabi. Nader Entessar is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of South Alabama where he was the Chair of the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice from 2006 through 2017. His most recent books are Iran Nuclear Negotiations: Accord and Détente since the Geneva Agreement of 2013 (2015), Iran Nuclear Accord and the Remaking of the Middle East (2018), and Trump and Iran: From Containment to Confrontation (2020). Michael Ewers is a geographer and interdisciplinary social scientist who studies the human capital dimensions of economic development in the Middle East, including migration, employ­ ment, and urbanization. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences at University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNCC). Before UNCC, he was a faculty member at Qatar University’s Social and Economic Survey Research Institute (SESRI) and Texas A&M University. xii

Contributors

W. Taylor Fain is Associate Professor and Graduate Studies Coordinator in the Department of History, University of North Carolina Wilmington. He is the author of American Ascendance and British Retreat in the Persian Gulf Region (2008). He received his MSFS from Georgetown Univer­ sity and his PhD in the history of American foreign relations from the University of Virginia. Courtney Freer is an Assistant Professorial Research Fellow at the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her book, Rentier Islamism: The Influence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Gulf Monarchies was published in 2018 by Oxford University Press and examines the socio-political role played by Muslim Brotherhood affiliates in Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Allen James Fromherz is Professor of Middle East History and Director of the Middle East Studies Center at Georgia State University. He is the author of Qatar, a Modern History (2016) and editor of The Gulf in World History: Arabia at the Global Crossroads (2018). His forthcoming book is titled The Global Gulf, a History. He was a senior fellow at NYU Abu Dhabi Humanities Institute and a fellow of the Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center. Jonathan Fulton is an Assistant Professor of Political Science in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Zayed University, in Abu Dhabi, UAE. He has written widely on China– Middle East relations for both academic and popular publications. He is the author of the China’s Relations with the Gulf Monarchies (2018) and co-editor of External Power and the Gulf Monarchies (2019). Saeid Golkar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and concurrently, a non-resident Senior Fellow on Middle East Policy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. His research focuses on comparative politics of authorit­ arian regimes in the Middle East. His book, Captive Society: The Basij Militia and Social Control in Post-Revolutionary Iran (2015), was awarded the Washington Institute silver medal prize. Fanar Haddad is Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute. He previously lectured in modern Middle Eastern politics at the University of Exeter, Queen Mary, University of London, and the National University of Singapore. Prior to obtaining his PhD, he was a Research Analyst at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He has since published widely on issues relating to historic and contemporary Iraq and on identity politics in the region. Islam Hassan is PhD Candidate at the School of Government and International Affairs, Durham University. His research interests include comparative politics and international rela­ tions of the Persian Gulf. He recently published “The Ruling Family Hegemony: Inclusion and Exclusion in Qatari Society,” in Sites of Pluralism: Community Politics in the Middle East (2019) and “The Ruling Family Security: Inclusion and Exclusion in Qatari Society,” in HAWWA: Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World (2018). Houchang Hassan-Yari is a Professor and Head of the Political Science Department at the Sultan Qaboos University and a Professor Emeritus at the Royal Military College of Canada. His most recent publications are “Iran and Iraq—GCC Rapprochement,” Middle East Policy 25, no. 4, 2018–19 and “The non-theocratic Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI),” in Challenging Theocracy: Ancient Lessons for Global Politics, eds. David Edward Tabachnick, Toivo Koivukoski, and Herminio Meireles Teixeira (2017). xiii

Contributors

Martin Hvidt is Associate Professor at the Centre for Contemporary Middle East Studies, University of Southern Denmark, and held a job as professor at Zayed University in United Arab Emirates (2013–16). His research focuses on the economic and social development of the Arab Gulf countries, mainly within the past fifty years and deals with development models, diversification, knowledge economy, and societal planning. Mehran Kamrava is Professor of Government at Georgetown University in Qatar. His books include A Concise History of Revolution (2020), Troubled Waters: Insecurity in the Persian Gulf (2018), Inside the Arab State (2018), The Impossibility of Palestine: History, Geography, and the Road Ahead (2016), and Qatar: Small State, Big Politics (2015). Joseph A. Kéchichian is Senior Fellow at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The author of sixteen published books, his latest titles are Saudi Arabia in 2030: The Emergence of a New Leadership, (Asan Institute, August 2019) and The Attempt to Uproot Sunni-Arab Influence: A Geo-Strategic Analysis of the Western, Israeli and Iranian Quest for Domination [A translation of Istihdaf Ahl al-Sunna (Targeting Sunnis) by Nabil Khalifé] (2017). Aiza Khan is a former Research Fellow at the Center for International and Regional Studies at Georgetown University in Qatar, where she is studying Culture and Politics. Her current research interests are in migration, refugees, and gender, and she has a special interest in the Persian Gulf and its history. Fred H. Lawson is Professor of Government Emeritus of Mills College and co-editor of the four-volume collection International Relations of the Middle East (2015). He is editor of the Syra­ cuse University Press series on the Modern Intellectual and Political History of the Middle East and an occasional Visiting Fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford. Mandana E. Limbert is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She received her PhD in Anthropology and Near Eastern Studies from the University of Michigan in 2002. Her publications include a co­ edited volume Timely Assets (2008), a monograph In the Time of Oil (2010), and numerous book chapters and journal articles on oil development in Oman as well as on Indian Ocean mobility. Laurence Louër is Associate Professor at Sciences Po, the Centre for International Research (CERI) in Paris. She is the author of To Be an Arab in Israel (2007), Transnational Shia Politics: Political and Religious Networks in the Gulf (2008), Shiism and Politics in the Middle East (2012), and Sunnis and Shias: A Political History (2020). Mojtaba Mahdavi is Professor of Political Science and ECMC Chair in Islamic Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. He is the author and editor of numerous works on post-Islamism, contemporary social movements and democratization in the Middle East and North Africa, post­ revolutionary Iran, and modern Islamic political thought. He is the co-editor of Towards the Dignity of Difference: Neither “End of History” nor “Clash of Civilizations” (2016) and the guest editor of “Contemporary Social Movements in the Middle East and Beyond”—Sociology of Islam (2014).

xiv

Contributors

Suzi Mirgani is Managing Editor at the Center for International and Regional Studies (CIRS), Georgetown University in Qatar. Among other publications, she is author of Target Markets: International Terrorism Meets Global Capitalism in the Mall (2017), editor of Art and Cultural Production in the Gulf Cooperation Council (2018), and book review editor for the Journal of Arabian Studies. Mirgani is an independent film-maker highlighting stories from the Arab world. Jessie Moritz is a Lecturer at the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University. She has previously held a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University, as well as visiting fellow positions at KFCRIS in Riyadh, Qatar University, and the University of Exeter. Her current research focuses on the political economy of energy in the Arabian Peninsula, with a particular focus on state–society relations and diversification strategies. Li-Chen Sim is an Assistant Professor at Khalifa University with a PhD from Oxford. Her expertise is on the international and domestic political economy of energy in Russia and the Persian Gulf states. She is currently working on her third book, Alternative Energy in the Middle East and North Africa. Her work is hosted on platforms such as the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington and she is highly visible as a guest speaker in the UAE. Amira Sonbol is Professor of History at the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown Univer­ sity. A specialist in the history of modern Egypt, Islamic history and law, women, gender and Islam, Sonbol’s books include The New Mamluks: Egyptian Society and Modern Feudalism (2000), Women, the Family and Divorce Laws in Islamic History (1996), The Creation of a Medical Profession in Egypt: 1800–1922 (1991), The Last Khedive of Egypt: The Memoirs of Abbas Hilmi II (1998), Women of the Jordan: Islam, Labor and Law (2003), Beyond the Exotic: Muslim Women’s Histories in Islamic Societies (2005), and Gulf Women (2012). Sonbol was founder and Editor-in-Chief of HAWWA: The Journal of Women of the Middle East and the Islamic World and Co-Editor of Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations. Stig Stenslie is a Professor at the Norwegian Defence Intelligence University College in Oslo. He has published a number of books on intelligence analysis, China, and the Middle East, including Regime Stability in Saudi Arabia: The Challenge of Succession (2011). Ghoncheh Tazmini is a Visiting Fellow at the LSE Middle East Centre where she conducts research on Iran-related themes as a British Academy grant-holder. She is the author of Khatami’s Iran: The Islamic Republic and the Turbulent Path to Reform (2009) and Revolution and Reform in Russia and Iran (2012). Kristian Coates Ulrichsen is a Research Fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy and an Associate Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs—Chatham House. His work focuses on the political economy and international relations of the Gulf and he is the author of six books on various aspects of Gulf States’ policies, including The Gulf States in International Political Economy (2015) and Qatar and the Gulf Crisis (2020). Florian Wiedmann is Assistant Professor at the University of Nottingham. He is specialized in investigating urban transformation from international and interdisciplinary perspectives. Wied­ mann’s involvement in research projects in four different countries has made it possible for him to gain in-depth experience in various areas of urbanism, from urban governance to urban eco­ xv

Contributors

nomics and the spatial impact of migration. His research is published in more than thirty journal articles and book chapters as well as three authored books. Steven Wright is an Associate Professor of International Relations, and an Associate Dean in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Hamad bin Khalifa University, Qatar. His research focuses on three main areas: international relations and the political economy of the Arab Gulf states, energy geopolitics, and US foreign policy toward the Gulf region. He obtained his PhD in International Relations from the University of Durham.

xvi

acknowledgments  

All books are products of collaborative efforts. By its very nature, this book has required far more collaboration than any other books I have been involved in so far. It goes without saying that the volume would simply not have existed had it not been for the collaboration of its many contributors, and the trust and confidence they placed in me for publishing their work. My sincere thanks to the many colleagues and scholars who agreed to share their original contri­ butions here. One of these contributors, Suzi Mirgani, also oversaw the formatting and copyediting of the chapters with meticulous care, for which I am most grateful. Over the course of the time it took to complete the project, Irakli Gobejishvili and Aiza Khan proved their mettle as excellent research assistants. Other colleagues at Georgetown University’s Center for Inter­ national and Regional Studies, where this book was conceived and completed, provided the supportive intellectual environment in which I could work on this and other similar projects. Grateful acknowledgment goes also to the Qatar Foundation for its support of research and other scholarly endeavors.

xvii

Figure 0.1 Map of the Persian Gulf.

1 

Politics in the Persian Gulf  

an overview  

Mehran Kamrava

By its very nature, the study of politics is a complicated and often fraught undertaking. In my own experience, I have often found the study of politics to be somewhat similar to peeling an onion. If one were to peel an onion, the first layer reveals itself to be made up of a series of highly intricate, interwoven patterns that combine to make a complex whole. That fine layer, with its intricate design of interwoven patterns, is followed by another, similarly complicated layer, and then another, and another. To me, politics is not that different—a fine layer of complex, interwoven, symbiotically related patterns, followed by successive and equally complex, linked patterns. This book, I believe, comes close to capturing much of that complexity when it comes to the politics of the Persian Gulf. I have arranged the book according to my own conceptualization of politics, as a domain of study with its own fine and complicated patterns and yet linked with and inseparable from other, equally complex, related fields. If, at the broadest level, politics is the art and science of the exercise of power, then power relationships are by nature bound to go beyond the composition and functions of institutions through which they are exercised. They are just as consequentially influenced by precedents and pre-existing traditions (history), by the actual and symbolic forces that shape relationships among individuals and their communities (society and culture), by the sources of wealth and patterns and consequences of its accumulation and expenditure (economy), and by matters of defense and interactions with other countries (security and international relations). This is not disciplinary malpractice. It is acknowledging that different disciplines are on their edges connected to one another, so that to fully and accurately understand one, its connections and interfaces with other disciplines have also to be understood. In examining the politics of the Persian Gulf, this book therefore casts a necessarily wide net. It begins with an examination of the rule of the Ottomans in the Arabian Peninsula and explores other dimensions of the region’s history up until independence in 1970. By its very nature, Ottoman rule in the region was weak and diffuse, only minimally disrupting pre-existing patterns of Sheikhly rule and the slow but steady progression of tribes into allied tribal confederacies and eventually the ruling clans and families. Following the Ottomans, the British only solidified what were the beginnings of independent statelets. By the time they had settled on their departure in 1968, slightly distinct national identities had already begun forming. Within a matter of a few years, the newly independent states were to reap the benefits of the first oil boom. Rentierism and, with it, the curse of abundant resources were not that far behind. 1

Mehran Kamrava

Iran and Saudi Arabia had different historical trajectories from the other, much smaller states of the Persian Gulf and from one another. Saudi Arabia was eventually forged out of what had started as an alliance of two men, Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab (1703–92) and Muhammad bin Saud (1710–65), in 1744. Eclipsed first by the Ottomans and then temporarily by the rival Al Rashid tribe, and armed with zeal of the Wahhabi movement’s Unitarian ideology, the decedents of Muhammad bin Saud eventually subdued rivals, unified much of the Arabian Peninsula under their rule, and established the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Iran’s trajectory was much different, having developed a semblance of a working state under the patrimonial rule of the Qajars (1794–1925), subject first to a Constitutional Revolution (1905–11) and then to a military coup that led to the establishment of the authoritarian, modernizing Pahlavi Dynasty (1925–79). As the Gulf states formed and made their appearance felt in relation to their own societies and other states, they gave rise to popular feelings of nationalism among their peoples. For more than a century, in fact, nationalism has been a constant element of Iranian identity, superimposed on a rich and diverse ethnic mosaic. Under very different circumstances and a result of very different historical processes, nationalism has also become a compelling force in the Arab oil monarchies of the region, manifesting itself either as unbridled self-confidence (Kuwait in the 1980s and Qatar in the 2000s) or outright chauvinism and bellicosity (Saudi Arabia and the UAE starting in the second half of the 2010s). In all cases, from Iraq and Iran down to the UAE and Oman, the state has done what it could to keep nationalist sentiments at fever pitch, all too frequently trying to divert attention from domestic shortcomings by rallying people around the flag and prompting them against real or imagined enemies. Nationalism, however, has been far from the only defining social and cultural force in the region. While operating in different historical, economic, and political contexts, all Persian Gulf societies are in the midst of profound changes. Traditional gender roles, for example, are being challenged and changed, as much by economic growth and development as by state policies. States, either out of deliberate measures to guarantee their hold on power or less intentionally, alternately enhance or erode the bonds that keep societies together or deepen the cleavages that fray their cohesion and unity. In Iraq’s case, and in Bahrain, the state has been the primary engine of sectarian strife. Similar to nationalism, all Persian Gulf societies have had to navigate between tradition and modernity and to deal with the causes and consequences of profound social and economic change. Few—in fact, perhaps no—aspects of life have been left untouched as a result of social change. In most places, the look, infrastructure, and spatial distribution of communities across cities have changed beyond recognition. The state, the economy, intensified cultural diffusion, and the societies’ own creativity are doing what they can to add to the speed and depth with which values, assumptions, symbols, identities, and relations are constantly being defined and redefined. The ensuing dislocations contributed to the eruption of a mass-based revolution in Iran. Revolutions of a similar kind are unlikely today in Iran or any of its neighbors, adaptable authoritarians having learnt from the Iranian Shah’s mistakes. But the processes and consequences of the profound changes underway are no less revolutionary. Nowhere are the changes unfolding in the Persian Gulf more apparent than in the economy. Petrodollars have literally changed the geography of the Persian Gulf, creating islands where none existed before. Cities in the southern littoral states grow into the sea on one side and into the sky on another. The region’s physical landscape is constantly changing. This is not the case in Iran, of course, where sanctions and mismanagement have combined to slow economic growth and development to a snail’s pace. In complete contrast, in the oil monarchies, the speed of development has been at breakneck, and the consequences are nothing less than astounding. 2

Politics in Persian Gulf

Rent- and resource-based economies that are transposed onto small demographies and authoritarian polities do not always foster the best outcomes. The ability to purchase something does not automatically amount to the capacity and the know-how to build it. In fact, lower efforts involved in accumulating wealth through unearned income because of resource abundance rather than producing and manufacturing sources of wealth can result in a resource curse. In the Persian Gulf, a resource curse has manifested itself in built-in economic inefficiencies, skewed labor markets, and frozen political institutions. These frozen political institutions have been invariably authoritarian. Authoritarianism became, and has been, the order of politics across the Persian Gulf since the inception of the modern state system, at times somewhat benignly and at times with more repression. Dictatorships come in different forms, and those in the Persian Gulf range from hybrid authoritarian systems in Iraq, Iran, and Kuwait, to relatively benign ones in Qatar and Oman, to less tolerant, more repressive ones in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates. But even in the hybrid systems, where elected institutions serve as safety valves for popular anger, mass frustrations at times spill over into open acts of defiance and protests. This is not a region whose penchant for political instability is about to be reversed any time soon. Across the Persian Gulf, frequent bouts of political instability have gone hand-in-hand with regional and international tensions. A long and deep history of colonial machinations, competing nationalisms, fragile political legitimacies, geostrategic significance, and resource abundance, and the more recent overlaying of sectarian othering have all combined to make the Persian Gulf region one of the world’s most militarized and war-prone areas. Multiple and overlapping security dilemmas characterize the region’s international relations, and one recordbreaking arms sale after another only adds to its vicious cycle of mistrust and militarization. All of this has occurred at a time when the Persian Gulf region has emerged as the new heart of the Middle East, the regional hub for global finance and commerce, logistics and airline connectivity, medical tourism and international branch campuses, world-class museums, and countless other services. For those of us studying the Middle East, this is all relatively new—Middle East politics having until recently focused almost exclusively on North Africa or the Levant, Iraq, Iran, and perhaps Saudi Arabia. Until the mid-2000s, I myself was unaware of the increasing importance of the littoral states of the Persian Gulf, both in themselves and in relation to the rest of the Middle East. For instance, in the first edition of The Modern Middle East: A Political History since the First World War, I devoted hardly any space to examining the states of the Persian Gulf region beyond exploring the reasons for Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Upon closer examination, however, and after having lived in the region for many years, I have come to discover its critical and growing significance to the Middle East and beyond. It is because of this increasing importance that a handbook of this type is both timely and much needed. The multidisciplinary logic laid out above has informed the organization of the present volume. The book is divided into six parts, each comprising chapters on the Persian Gulf’s historical context, societies and cultures, domestic politics, economic development, regional security dynamics, and relations with the rest of the world. No matter how comprehensive, no one book could possibly cover all the relevant dimensions of a region’s politics. My hope is that this book, with the depth and breadth of its chapters, will do its share in providing as comprehensive an examination of Persian Gulf politics as possible.

3

Part I  

Historical context 

2 

THe OTTOmans in THe  

arabian Peninsula  

Aiza Khan

Introduction Qalʿat al Qatif, literally “the castle at Qatif,” is one of the most appropriate symbols of the Ottoman impact on the Persian Gulf. The foundations of this castle were laid in the third century by the Sassanid kings. When Qatif became part of the Ottoman Empire, the Ottomans refurbished it and used it a military base in the Gulf. Simultaneously, it was a multipurpose complex of eleven mosques, guest houses, a keep for the sultan, a residential complex, a commercial marketplace, and a civilian-purpose warehouse. The Ottomans lost sovereignty of Qatif to the British in World War I, and the castle fell to ruins by the 1980s with the discovery of oil in the area. The Persian Gulf was a region rich in history and culture, inhabited and governed by a diversity of people from the Neo-Persian Sassanids to the Ottoman Turks to the British. It was impacted, like all other parts of the world, by changes in the global climate, shifts in power, and new discoveries, and the Ottoman presence in the Persian Gulf was part of these contingencies. During the last few decades of the Ottoman presence in the Gulf, Ottoman rule attracted widespread support among the local populace. The benevolent empire shared a religion with the majority of the populace, which helped them feel represented and understood. Influential figures in the empire that shared this sentiment were apprehensive of the possibility of European colonialism. A prominent scholar of the time, Şehbenderzade Ahmed Hilmi (1865–1914), is reported to have said: The hope of all Muslims everywhere was in the Ottoman Empire and the Caliphate … Should they remain divided, they would be exposed to two danger-conflicting interests and the cooperation of the power against them. Against these dangers, united Islam, enjoying the moral support of 400 million, would not be a force to be taken lightly.1 He further notes that:  the Muslim elements in the Ottoman Empire were the only ones hoping for the empire’s survival. Their unity was the sole remedy for the empire’s troubles and the only guarantee for its independence. On the other hand, division would be disastrous,2 7

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emphasizing the threat that European colonialism posed to the Arab world, and Arab support for the Empire. Another influential scholar of the time, Celal Nuri (1881–1938), chimed in and insisted that the pan-Islamist ideology of the Ottoman Empire was essential to the unity of the Muslim umma and preservation of its religious sentiment, something that was very important to the Muslim population in the uncertain and turbulent turn of the century. The Ottoman sultans too were aware of the impending threat of their European rivals and were taking measures to address this threat. Sultan Mahmud II, who ascended to the throne in 1808, was quick to carry out military reforms by introducing formal and institutionalized training for military men in order to adapt to the large empire and to enact effective communication. He also strengthened the centralized power of the empire and reformed the taxing system that formerly irked the non-Muslim subjects in order to earn their loyalty as part of a secularization agenda. Simultaneously, Sultan Mahmud II maintained the trust of his Muslim supporters by upholding a pan-Islamic ideology and preserving the sentiments of the unity of the umma.3 This ideology was upheld by the Ottomans until the end of the empire—the last Ottoman sultan, Abdulhamid II, was a pan-Islamist who was supported by the Arab Provinces of the empire, but was deposed in 1908 by a revolt in the capital instigated by an organization called the Young Turks.4 Abdulhamid II believed that endorsing pan-Islamism was his moral duty and his way to gain leverage during a shift in the international balance of power.5 Despite the foresight and initiative of the Ottoman sultans to gain the support of both the Muslim majority and the non-Muslim minority in their provinces in the Arab world, and despite the support of the majority of the Muslim populace in the Persian Gulf, the Ottoman Empire came to a violent end due to internal turbulence—it ultimately lost its Arab provinces to its European rivals. This chapter will explore the reasons why the mighty empire collapsed, despite its leaders’ initiative, foresight, and benevolence.

The origins and structure of the Ottoman Empire The Ottoman Empire was founded by Othman I, son of Ertoghrul who was a nomadic tribe leader under the Seljuk Empire. Ertoghrul left Othman with some territory granted to him by the Sultan Alaeddin over which he had little sovereignty.6 Upon succeeding Ertoghrul in 1288, Othman led a more ambitious and successful reign than his father. It is from him that the Ottoman Empire acquired its name. Othman ruled this empire from his capital in Bursa for thirty-eight years, from 1299 to 1326, during which he expanded his territory from his father’s humble Sugut and Eski-Sheir to an area north of the Bosporus River and Black Sea.7 Othman faced little resistance in this expansion due to his armada and military superiority over his contemporaries.8 The Seljuk Empire had declined by the end of the thirteenth century, and the Mongolian control over Persia was deteriorating in the early fourteenth century, allowing Othman to expand his control.9 The conquest of important cities such as Bursa and Constantinople (now Istanbul) in the early years of his empire gave Othman access to resources and trade routes, facilitating further expansion westwards into Europe, and eastwards into the Persian Gulf. Another advantage that the young empire had over its contemporary Byzantine emperors was that of its proximity to the Muslim world. Ottoman sultans were able to draw on a young and dedicated Muslim armada from the Anatolian province who were committed, like the Christian Crusaders, to spreading their religion and gaining land and access to resources. These warrior qazis came from the nomadic tribes in Anatolia. The tribes’ pursuit for pasture land made the qazis more driven by the Ottoman conquests, and the region’s nomadic structure became increasingly militaristic, contributing greatly to the expansion of the Ottoman Empire.10 8

The Ottomans in the Arabian Peninsula

The qazis made up the primary Ottoman military force, and were financed by an institution called the timar. The institution of timar formed the economic system of the empire. Resources entered the timar through rural taxes and were distributed by the sultan’s appointees. This system of taxation and distribution of wealth did not result in a hierarchical pyramid in society like the feudal structures of Europe. Instead, it made all working people in the empire a subject of the Ottoman Sultan, subordinate to the administrators that constituted those who collected taxes (timar holders) and the judges (qazis).11 This centralized nature made the Ottoman Empire more powerful than its European contemporaries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. What also contributed to this success was the high esteem in which the warriors were held. As the empire grew, the qazis no longer met the military need of the expanding force and so, one-fifth of the prisoners of war were made to convert to Islam, learn the Turkish language, and were then recruited into the army. Such warriors came to be known as the janissaries. No one living in an Islamic state could be enslaved, regardless of religion, unless they tried to overthrow the sultan. This condition in which subjects remained free ensured the loyalty of the janissaries to the sultan, a benevolent fate they would not have had as prisoners of war elsewhere. Their loyalty to the sultan would allow them to gain status and prestige in the military, something that made the institution an attractive choice for many prisoners. There is evidence to suggest that at least from the fifteenth century onward, through reforms made under Mehmet, the empire, and the institution of the military in particular, was meritocratic. Military men had to attend school at the palace where they were taught skills deemed necessary for them to serve in order to qualify as commanders or governors of provinces. The highest-ranking military officers, the viziers (advisors), convened frequently as the imperial council to the sultan and assisted him in the functioning of the empire.12 Religion in the Ottoman Empire too was centralized. Sunni Islam was taught in state mosques and schools constructed and funded by the sultanate. While the state claimed to uphold the true Islam, variations of the faith existed across the empire. Shamanism heavily influenced and penetrated Islamic practices in the Ottoman Empire, as migrating nomadic groups integrated their new faith with the old. Such a structure made the Ottoman Empire very benevolent to its subjects. Every citizen had an equal status under the sultan and could not be enslaved. Citizens of the empire enjoyed freedom of religion, fair taxation and distribution of resources, and were governed by fairly meritocratic state institutions and military. Such structure helped the sultan gain the favor of his people.

The Ottoman Empire in the Persian Gulf In 1534, conflict with the Persian Safavid Empire allowed the Ottomans to arrive at the margins of the Persian Gulf and gain territory in Eastern Asia Minor, including both the Persian and Arab Iraqs.13 Part of this conflict was religious; there was friction between the Shiʿi Safavids and the Sunni Ottomans.14 However, a larger contributor to the conflict was the Ottoman desire to gain better control and access to the Silk Route and Spice Routes that ran from Tabriz in modern-day Iran to Erzurum in Turkey, and from Basra and Baghdad in Iraq to Aleppo in Syria, respectively.15 Mehmed II, Ottoman Sultan in the mid-fifteenth century, realized the strategic importance of including the Persian Gulf in the Ottoman Empire—it would give the empire access to the two most important trade routes in the region, the Silk and Spice routes, which would provide significant economic opportunities.16 Simultaneously, Ottoman merchants’ involvement in this 9

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trade, Mehmed believed, would end the privileged position that European rival states’ merchants had enjoyed under the Byzantine Empire.17 Emperor Selim II, in the late fifteenth century, also realized the strategic importance of the Persian Gulf if the Ottomans were to address their rival in the east, the Safavid Empire; with control over the Gulf, they would be able to disrupt the Safavid Empire’s exports of silk to the West and hence negatively impact their economy as well as solidify their own control.18 Conquests in Eastern Asia, starting with Syria and Egypt, hence, soon followed. By the year 1538, the Ottoman sultan was recognized as the sovereign in Basra—his name was read in Friday prayer sermons and people were expected to obey the Pasha of Baghdad, the Ottoman administrator of Iraq.19 After becoming well established in Basra, Iraq, the Ottomans made friendly advances toward the Portuguese.20 The Portuguese were their competitors for control over the trade routes through the Persian Gulf, the straits of Bahrain and to the Indian Ocean, and were already well established in the region by the time the Ottomans had arrived. A letter that the Dom Manuel de Lima wrote to the Portuguese Governor of India narrated how the Ottomans were eager to engage in trade on the routes in order to make Basra prosperous for merchants, and, as a result, make the entire region flourish.21 Soon after their conquest in Basra in 1538, the Ottomans established their control in Lahsa, Bihar, India, though little is known about this conquest. The provincial administration of Lahsa extended to Qatar in the Persian Gulf.22 The Pasha of Basra then proceeded to make gains in the desired trade routes by demanding the surrender of the fort of Qatif. Qatif then became a second base for the Ottomans after Basra on the coast of the Persian Gulf. At this stage, the timar system was revised in order to strengthen control over the growing empire. The Sultan Selim II and his viziers decided that new territories would be taxed, and the salaries of the soldiers, timars, and state officials would be paid from their respective provincial taxes. A portion of these taxes would go to the sultan’s treasury.23 Ottoman success in Qatif in 1550 alarmed the Portuguese, and the Governor of India D. Alfonso de Noronha appointed an army to push against Ottoman control of the region.24 The Ottomans defended Qatif successfully, but were forced to surrender after a week-long siege. After this success, Noronha advanced to Basra. The Ottomans in Basra, however, succeeded by deceiving the Portuguese; they pretended to have forged an alliance with the city’s Arab population, thus exaggerating their actual power. The Ottomans were thus able to maintain their presence in the Persian Gulf’s coastal areas a while longer. Ottoman naval bases were set up in the Red Sea as they had established control in Egypt and the Suez between 1516 and 1517. This allowed them to have an unwavering stronghold in the Red Sea. These naval bases also allowed them to sail the Indian Ocean. In 1538, the naval strength was used to besiege Gujarat, India. Although the attempt failed, it made a statement about Ottoman capabilities as they were able to establish their control in Aden and Zebid in modern-day Yemen. Their naval might in the Red Sea was such that they defeated Estavo da Gama in his attempt to take control of the waters in 1541.25 In 1552, the Portuguese expressed interest in Bahrain in order to gain control of Basra. However, before they could act, the Ottomans captured Muscat, formerly a Portuguese territory, and took the opposing garrisons as prisoners.26 In the same year, the Ottomans proceeded to capture Hormuz and bombarded the castle, forcing the Portuguese to retreat to Kishm in Persia, and not challenge Ottoman authority in Iraq, Yemen, and Oman.27 Bahrain, however, remained contested; it provided a sea route between Hormuz and Basra and was the center of pearl diving in region, making it an attractive area to both the Ottomans and the Portuguese.28 In 1553, the Ottomans continued their attempts to take Bahrain, but were 10

The Ottomans in the Arabian Peninsula

unsuccessful as the Portuguese had superior knowledge of the region. The Ottomans continued efforts with geographers and other skilled personnel, but this ended in violent battle that resulted in heavy losses on both sides. These battles continued intermittently until 1559, when the westerlies carrying deadly disease killed men on both sides, causing the Ottomans to surrender, and the Portuguese to allow the surrender on relatively lenient terms.29 The late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, however, saw new powers emerge in the Gulf. The Persian Safavids under Shah Abbas I challenged Portuguese influence and invaded Bahrain. The Portuguese, eager to maintain ties and peace in the region, did little to oppose this invasion.30 This allowed the Safavids to continue to advance on Portuguese territory, which diminished Portuguese influence. British and Dutch traders also expressed interest in the region at the turn of this century, and their trade relations with Persia challenged the Portuguese monopoly over commerce in the region.31 The Portuguese grew worried and for good reason. Shah Abbas launched concentrated efforts to expel the Portuguese from Hormuz, one of the most strategically important straits for trade in the Persian Gulf. He further permitted the British traders in the East India Company to construct a factory at Jask, a coastal city that would allow inland trade.32 The Portuguese, now threatened for their neighboring territory in India, sent troops to put an end to this, but were defeated by the British by 1619.33 The British quickly gained power and access to the castle of Hormuz; they were exempted from customs and taxes, and received custody of Christian prisoners in the region.34 As the power of the Portuguese deteriorated, it was quickly replaced by the British who became a stronger threat to the Pasha of Basra and the Sultan in Istanbul by the year 1640. After the death of Shah Abbas I in 1645, the Dutch forced their way into the silk trade in Persia. Competition in trade and the Anglo-Dutch wars in 1653 and 1665 led to hostilities between the two rivals in the Gulf, and financial losses on the Dutch side.35 It is important to note, however, that for most of the seventeenth century, the East India Company was concerned primarily with commerce and did not become politically involved until the end of the century. At this stage, there were three struggles in the Persian Gulf: that between the two local powers of the Safavids and the Ottomans; that between the European powers of Portugal, Britain, and France; and that between all of these powers and the local Arab populations. While the seventeenth century saw a rise in conflict between the European powers, the Ottomans and Safavids took advantage of this shift in attention and gained power. The Ottomans had already occupied Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, and parts of Oman by the end of the sixteenth century. The Safavids had challenged Ottoman power in the early seventeenth century, but arrived at peaceful negotiations soon after.36 After the death of Shah Abbas I, the power of the Safavids declined steadily relative to their contemporaries, but they were replaced by the indigenous Arabs—the Arabs of Oman built a powerful navy, attacked the Portuguese, and retook control of Muscat in 1640.37 As Arabs filled the power vacuum left by the declining Safavids, Ottoman power remained stagnant during the seventeenth century. The eighteenth century for the Ottomans was characterized by poor administration. Prior to this, the Ottomans knew little about their European rivals who were gaining power and influence in their empire. Simultaneously, their knowledge of science, politics, and world affairs was growing obsolete. It was then that the Ottomans celebrated the Tulip Period, a time of artistic expression, lavish architecture, introspection, and growth.38 It was also during the Tulip Period that the printing press became available in the Turkish language. This development allowed the circulation of vast subjects such as religion, history, languages, mathematics, geography, government, and the sciences throughout the empire. This knowledge flowed in and out of neighboring territories.39 11

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The Tulip Period, although criticized as a time of complacency and gluttony for its introspective nature, was a pivotal time for the Ottoman Empire. Such production and circulation of knowledge and information was what formed the identity of the empire. The religious texts produced and compiled during this period were in a language accessible to the general public in the empire, allowing for the pan-Islamism that later emerged. It was also Western discourses of secularism and alternative forms of government that shaped the views of the Young Turk organization that overthrew the empire. Both of these movements are discussed later in this chapter. Furthermore, it was also during this period that technological breakthroughs from other parts of the world reached the empire; its future would be shaped by evolving knowledge of geography, cartography, compasses, and even new war tactics.40 Midhat Pasha, the governor of Baghdad during the nineteenth century, realized the threat of the European powers to Ottoman territory in the Arab world and sought to reinforce the dwindling Ottoman influence in the region. He drafted a detailed plan of how he would do so: more effective administration, economic development, and ensuring fair taxation.41 This plan was carried out under Sultan Abdulhamid II, however, despite the Sultan’s efforts, the empire lost territory to the British.42 At this stage, the Ottoman economy was in decline— previous wars had drained it, and corrupt officials were further taking a toll on it. Furthermore, access to the Silk Route had not benefitted the Ottomans as they had expected. Merchants in the empire were poorly regulated, and, as a result, very few of the profits generated by Ottoman merchants made it into the state treasury as taxes.43 Additionally, the empire’s inability to properly allocate resources to enhance communication, economic productivity, and, most importantly, efficient administration had cost them the favor of local administrators before the end of the nineteenth century.44 By 1875, the empire was bankrupt. Underpaid qazis, janissaries, and timars succumbed to corruption, weakening the empire. This further weakened the Ottomans’ ability to secure trade in the Gulf, something that they competed over with the British; as the Ottoman Empire weakened, the British gained strength. With economic decline came political decline. Prominent local religious leaders and influential figures were given leading roles at the provincial level. To keep peace and appease the locals, the Ottoman sultans, particularly Abdulhamid II, were known to bend over backwards for these rulers with the intention to keep the populace happy. Local governments took charge of collecting taxes, the judiciary, health care, education, and security.45 These local leaders were able to exploit their position and take advantage of the Ottoman rivalry with the British.46 The State of Qatar, governed from the Ottoman base in Lahsa, was the first to do so. In 1893, the sheikh of Qatar revolted against the Ottomans. Sheikh Mubarak al Sabah of Kuwait soon followed. The Saudis, through careful diplomacy, managed to lay the foundations for their independent state without force.47 While the local leadership grew corrupt, the Ottomans appropriated the pan-Islamist sentiment to garner support. This sentiment was first cultivated by the European rivals to the region in order to spread discord among the non-Muslim minorities in Ottoman territories, hoping to foster rebellions in the Christian provinces of the empire and bolster support for themselves.48 The Ottoman Empire was known to give leadership positions to non-Turk subjects from occupied provinces. The inclusion of local leadership was used to present the empire as Muslim in nature. Those loyal to the sultan were rewarded with wealth and high status.49 The empire, hence, was well received by the common people—they saw the Ottomans as fellow Muslims who preserved rather than plundered the existing order.50 This can be seen in the simultaneous re-emergence of the religious sentiment and the rise of Wahhabism in the face of Western colonialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.51 Abdulhamid II appealed to pan-Islamism as a unifying force to preserve his empire in the Arab world in the face of European imperialism, something that shaped the foreign policy and internal affairs of the empire in turmoil.52 12

The Ottomans in the Arabian Peninsula

As the empire lost its provinces to the corruption and treason of local leaders, it also lost support in the capital. A coalition of young army officers and intellectuals formed an underground group called the Young Turks with the mission to depose the sultan and replace the autocratic government with a constitutional and democratic one in the empire and all its colonies.53 The leaders of this coalition were the Turks who had been influenced by European ideals during the Tulip Period, as discussed above. The sultan, an absolute monarch who decided state affairs with a small number of loyal aristocrats, could not handle such opposition. The Young Turks also came directly in opposition to the Sultan’s pan-Islamist sentiment in the Arab provinces as they advocated for a secular form of government in order to preserve both Muslim and Christian provinces of the empire. This internal conflict coincided with the external threat to the empire from Britain and France, and World War I, a war in which the Ottoman Empire allied with Germany and Austro-Hungarian Empire against the British and French. While the Ottomans were able to defeat the British in battles over their own territory, the Arab provinces felt alienated and dissatisfied with their administration, which was preoccupied with war. As a result, the Arabs revolted against the Ottomans, and their uprisings gathered the support of the British fighting against the Ottomans for this very territory. The Ottomans lost support on all sides; their provinces in the Arab world fell to Britain and France by the end of this war.54 By 1924, the Ottoman Empire was replaced by a military government under Mustafa Kemal, a leader of the Young Turks coalition who later took the name Atatürk, meaning father of the Turks. His government maintained that the failure of the empire had been due to its Islamic nature. Atatürk believed that religion was what made society regressive and unsuccessful and that the way to progress was through science and reason. Atatürk’s government reduced the role of religion to the private sphere and formed the secular state of Turkey.55

Why did the Ottoman Empire decline? In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Ottomans were deeply concerned with the empire’s vulnerability regarding the British threat to their territories. This threat was not just military in nature; the Ottomans were also concerned that the British would penetrate their empire using nonviolent means and undermine the integrity of the empire from within. This concern was legitimate, and both suspicions proved correct. For example, from 1862, British telegraph lines connected India, Baghdad, Tehran, and Istanbul, and a mail service also ran between Iraq and India, making the Levant and the Gulf easily penetrable by the British and their influence.56 From the middle of the twentieth century, British warships patrolled the Gulf where they came in contact with the local leadership of the Ottomans, which allowed both sides to supposedly strike crucial agreements. British presence in these waters was hard to avoid since the trade that dominated the Gulf and the Indian Ocean was controlled by the British to and from colonial India. These ships posed a threat to the Ottoman Empire’s stronghold over the Persian Gulf, as they could easily carry troops and weapons to take the region by force. It also increased the likelihood of British interference in the disputed Ottoman areas in the Gulf, such as Bahrain or Kuwait, under the guise of settling local conflict, especially under corrupt local governments. Suleyman Pasha, a local governor was particularly concerned with British distribution of arms and money in the Gulf to expand their influence and to incite conflict.57 Reports from Mehmed Ali supported Suleyman Pasha’s claims and recommended limiting trade with the British to specific areas, a recommendation that the Ottomans were unable to follow.58 Suleyman Pasha’s reports indicate that the British sent suspicious gifts to the numerous local governors in the coastal towns of the Gulf that were patrolled by these very British ships. 13

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Through gifts, influence, and intimidation, the British had bribed and coerced local leaders to side with them and commit treason against the Ottomans. The third group that contributed to the downfall of the empire was the Young Turks coalition. As described above, the coalition consisted of intellectuals, army officers, and youth who opposed the Ottoman Sultan and demanded a constitutional form of government. As detailed earlier, to appease to this coalition, Sultan Abdulhamid II carried out tax reform and made attempts to modernize the empire. However, the aristocratic nature of the empire and the panIslamic ideology that it pushed in the Arab provinces was seen as contradictory to the demands of secularism that the Young Turks made. As a result, the Young Turks coalition could not be pacified; while the Ottoman Empire struggled to address the loss of its provinces to its European rivals, the Young Turks uprooted the empire from the capital and replaced it with the Republic of Turkey under a Young Turks’ leader, Mustafa Kemal. Examining the history of the Ottoman Empire, it would be convenient to attribute its decline to its three opponents: the European powers, the corrupt local provincial leadership, and the Young Turks, who posed external, provincial, and internal threats to the empire respectively. However, its decline was part of a much larger process of global change that resulted from slow and, at the time, undetectable shifts in economic, political, social, and cultural structures taking place in the world. Furthermore, the Persian Gulf was at the center of the eight most prominent circuits of trade in the world that encompassed Asia, Europe, and North Africa. The Ottoman Empire was directly impacted by these shifts. The Ottoman Empire, like most of its contemporary empires, was heavily dependent on agriculture. Taxes from peasants that owned and worked farmland made up a significant portion of the state’s treasury. Changes in harvest due to climate change or famine made these peasants aware of new political ideas, and better understood their rights and their relationship to the state. This is something we observe in the Ottoman Empire, both in the case of the provincial leadership’s susceptibility to bribery and the Anatolian Young Turks’ demands for a constitutional state. Since the state relied on taxes from these groups, when tax revenue ran low in difficult circumstances, the empire lacked the resources and force to subdue revolt and opposition from these parties. Up until the eighteenth century, when European powers began to take control of trade routes and colonize territories, no empire attempted to monopolize the trade systems. The Ottomans and the Safavids, for example, were content with maintaining peace and only taxing the goods going through the Strait of Hormuz or the Ports of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf. A prominent example of this is the Portuguese refusal to engage in violent battle with the Safavids when Shah Abbas I threatened their control over Bahrain. As long as the Portuguese were able to carry out trade in those waters, they were content. The world was polycentric; there were many centers of trade and many empires that traded with one another. This trade also permitted an exchange of language, ideas, and literature—something we observe happening in the Tulip Age. While the empires in Asia engaged in a polycentric system of mutually beneficial trade, European states engaged in warfare until the mid-eighteenth century. The conflict between the Protestants and Catholic Church and the Spanish Inquisition resulted in the consolidation of Europe into smaller political units that formed sovereign states. Wars accelerated the process of nation building in Europe. As small states struggled to finance their wars with meager taxes, they were forced to come up with innovative ways of banking and loans that paved the way for capitalist enterprises such as the East India Company that traded in the Gulf. These wars also gave rise to new political ideologies and a shift in understanding: the source of a government’s legitimacy no longer came from divine rights, but from democratic ones. The eighteenth century 14

The Ottomans in the Arabian Peninsula

saw the emergence of a new form of government in Britain that was transformed from an absolute monarchy to a parliament that the monarch consulted with. This coincided with the Tulip Revolution as merchants carried these ideas to the Ottomans. Simultaneously, a rise in Protestantism, as discussed by Max Weber in his canonical work The Rise of Protestantism and the Spirit of Capitalism, resulted in a commercial foreign policy based on mercantilist ideas that allowed war for commercial purposes. This contributed greatly to the aggressive way in which the British took control of not just the Gulf but also the rest of their colonies from earlier empires including the Ottomans. It took centuries for global processes to change the trade systems, politics, ideologies, and economic systems of the world that brought down the Ottomans. Qalʿat al Qatif stands as a prime example of the impact of these global processes and systems—constructed by one empire, occupied by another, and used for several purposes: as a fort, a military base, a residential complex, a palace, a market, and a warehouse, each adapting the castle to the needs of the time and those who inhabited it. The Ottomans were some of Qalʿat al Qatif’s many inhabitants and that made them both contributors and recipients of the shifts in global cultural currents.

Notes 1 Quoted in Zhongmin Liu and Meng Shu, “Nationalist Thoughts and Islam in the Late Ottoman Empire,” Asian Journal of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies 11, no. 2 (2017): 23. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., 24. 4 Cemil Aydin, “The Impact of WWI on Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asianist Visions of World Order,” in The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 95. 5 Ibid. 6 Baron G. Shaw-Lefevre Eversley, The Turkish Empire, Its Growth and Decay (Memphis, TN: General Books, 1918), 15. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid., 18. 9 Suraiya Faroqhi and Shelley Laura Frisch, The Ottoman Empire: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2009), 41. 10 Ibid., 45. 11 Ibid., 46–47. 12 Ibid., 48–49. 13 Salih Özbaran, “The Ottoman Turks and the Portuguese in the Persian Gulf,” Journal of Asian History 6, no. 1 (1972): 50. 14 Albert H. Lybyer, “The Ottoman Turks and the Routes of Oriental Trade,” in English Historical Review 30, no. 120 (1915): 577–588. 15 Özbaran, “The Ottoman Turks and the Portuguese,” 51. 16 Stanford J. Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey: Volume I, Empire of the Gazis: The Rise and Decline of the Ottoman Empire, 1280–1808 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 60. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 83. 19 Özbaran, “The Ottoman Turks and the Portuguese,” 52. 20 The Letter of Dom Manuel de Lima, Governor of Hormuz to D. Joau de Castro, Governor of India (Hormuz, June 23, 1547), cited in Özbaran, “The Ottoman Turks and the Portuguese,” Appendix I. 21 Ibid. 22 Özbaran, “The Ottoman Turks and the Portuguese,” 56. 23 Ibid., 55. 24 Ibid., 58. 25 Ibid., 60. 26 Cengiz Orhonlu, “Hint Kaptanlığı ve Pîrî Reis,” [“The Indian Captain and the Piri Reis”], in Belleten XXXIV (Ankara, 1970), 279.

15

Aiza Khan 27 Corpo Cronologico, Parte Ia, Maço 89, Doc. 9, fol. 3v-5r. Translated from the letter of Ra’is Nur al-Din [to the Governor of India] which Fernão Farto has brought [to Goa]. Hormuz, October 30, 1552, cited in Özbaran, “The Ottoman Turks and the Portuguese,” Appendix II. 28 Özbaran, “The Ottoman Turks and the Portuguese,” 66. 29 Ibid., 68. 30 Abbas Faroughy, The Bahrain Islands (750–1951) (New York: Verry, Fisher & Co., 1951), 63. 31 Abdul Aziz M. Awad, “The Gulf in the Seventeenth Century,” British Society for Middle Eastern Studies. Bulletin 12, no. 2 (1985): 125. 32 Ibid. 33 Eskandar Beg Monshi, History of Shah ‘Abbas the Great, trans. Roger M. Savory (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1978), 1204. 34 Awad, “The Gulf in the Seventeenth Century,” 125. 35 Ibid., 127–128. 36 Ibid., 129. 37 Frederick Charles Danvers, Report to the Secretary of State for India in Council on the Portuguese Records Relating to the East Indies (London: India Office, 1892), 121. 38 Norman Itzkowitz, Ottoman Empire and Islamic Tradition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 103. 39 Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, 236–237. 40 Ibid., 264. 41 Engin Deniz Akarli, review of The Ottoman Gulf: The Creation of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, by Frederick F. Anscombe, The Middle East Journal 54, no. 1 (2000): 124. 42 Mehrdad Kia, The Ottoman Empire: A Historical Encyclopedia, vol. 2 (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2017), 69. 43 Ibid., 159. 44 Akarli, review of The Ottoman Gulf, 124. 45 Caesar E. Farah, “Arabism & Turks: Common Heritage, Common Destiny,” in Arabs and Ottomans: A Checkered Relationship (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2002), 349. 46 Ibid. 47 Akarli, review of The Ottoman Gulf, 124. 48 Caesar E. Farah, “Arab Supporters of Sultan Abdulhameed II: ‘Izzat Al-Abid,’ ” in Arabs and Ottomans: A Checkered Relationship (Istanbul: Isis Press, 2002), 393. 49 Farah, “Arab Supporters of Sultan Abdulhameed II,” 394. 50 Farah, “Arabism & Turks,” 349. 51 Natana J. De Long-Bas, review of The Ottoman Gulf: The Creation of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, by Frederick F. Anscombe, The Arab Studies Journal 6/7, no. 2/1 (1998): 168. 52 Kia, The Ottoman Empire, 70. 53 Ibid., 55. 54 Ibid., 61. 55 Marilyn R. Waldman and Malika Zeghal, “Islamic World,” Encyclopædia Britannica, January 3, 2019, www.britannica.com/topic/Islamic-world. 56 Gökhan Çetinsaya, “The Ottoman View of British Presence in Iraq and the Gulf: The Era of Abdulhamid II,” Middle Eastern Studies 39, no. 2 (2003): 194. 57 BOA [Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi], YEE [Yıldız Esas Evrakı], 14/1188/126/9, ‘Irak’ın ıslahına dair Bağdad’da ikamete memur Süleyman Paşa layihası’, dated 9 Ramazan 1309. For Süleyman Paşa, see Robert Devereux, “Süleyman Pasha’s ‘the Feeling of the Revolution,’ ” Middle Eastern Studies 15, no. 1 (1979): 3–10, cited in Gökhan Çetinsaya, “The Ottoman View of British Presence in Iraq and the Gulf: The Era of Abdulhamid II,” Middle Eastern Studies 39, no. 2 (2003): 196. 58 BOA [Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi], YEE [Yıldız Esas Evrakı], 14/366/126/9, 8 Kanun-ısâni 1304, cited in Çetinsaya, “The Ottoman View of British Presence in Iraq,” 196.

16

3 

The Persian Gulf in The  

Pre-ProTecToraTe Period  

1790–1853 

Allen James Fromherz Introduction In November 1904, Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India for His Majesty Edward VII, held a Durbar, or gathering of the rulers of the Gulf, on board the Argonaut anchored at Sharjah. After proclaiming the greatness of British authority and the policy of “guardianship and protection which has given you peace and guaranteed your rights,” the Viceroy made a remarkable assertion about the independent Arab States’ period of Gulf history, a period characterized by fervent and dramatic changes in the political, religious, and tribal claims to land, power, and pearls. This was the pre-protectorate, the decades immediately before the formalizing of British presence and security treaties in the Gulf. It began in the 1790s with the decline of Persian and Dutch power, the rise of the Bu Saidis in Muscat, Oman and the Qasimi tribe in Ras al Khaimah on the Arabian side of the Gulf. The signing of the Treaty of Perpetual Peace in 1853, which solidified an earlier 1820 treaty between Britain and the Gulf Arabs, ended the pre-protectorate period in the Gulf and opened an era of formalized British presence. Even after 1853, however, there was never outright British control. The British Protectorate lasted into the last decades of the Trucial States period and the eventual, often-reluctant full independence of the Gulf states in the 1970s. In fact, the British were far from the only influential, imperial presence in the region. In the nineteenth century, another imperial power, the Ottomans, were able to exert imperial influence on Gulf land even as Britain patrolled the seas well after 1853. Nonetheless, the impact of the British Protectorate and security guarantees was most substantial after 1853. The Protectorate was a source of pride, especially for the British Raj, which saw the Gulf as part of its orbit. Lord Curzon painted a rather dreary history of this pre-protectorate Gulf, the Gulf before the Crown’s benevolent “pacification.” He draped the Gulf’s nineteenth-century past into two eras: one of primeval chaos before the 1850s; and one of order afterwards, with the Union Jack forming the curtain between worlds, remaining remarkably resilient. This British understanding of Gulf history, one split between primeval and primitive piracy and the relative security of the protectorate, presents historians with a particular challenge. The British not only influenced Gulf history, they wrote most of it. While there are some local, Persian, and Ottoman sources, a large proportion of the sources on the Gulf are British reports, archives. The ultimate goal of these sources, most of which were compiled in Bombay, was to serve the interests of the economic, colonial behemoth that was British India. India was the 17

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Crown Jewel of the British Empire. The Gulf was one part of the setting on which that Jewel was mounted. It was important to Curzon and to his predecessors that setting be stable. For Curzon, there was little to redeem the decades before the protectorate. You know that a hundred years ago there were constant trouble and fighting in the Gulf; almost every man was a marauder or a pirate; kidnapping and slave-trading flourished; fighting and bloodshed went on without stint or respite; no ship could put out to sea without fear of attack; the pearl fishery was a scene of annual conflict; and security of trade or peace there was none.1 What a relief, Curzon said, that “then it was that the British Government intervened … British forces occupied the forts and towns on the coast that we see from this deck.”2 Curzon referred to the suppression of “piracy” emanating from towns such as Sharjah and the struggle by Britain to maintain shipping lines despite attacks by al-Qasimi, who controlled the region around Sharjah and Ras al Khaimah, and their Wahhabi supporters in Arabia.3 While some effort was made by the British and their native agents (native agents were non-British imperial subjects who took on roles representing the British crown) to understand the origin and motivations of these pesky tribes and the British attempted to steer clear of conflict, sometimes at great cost to their crews, the story from the perspective of the ancestors of the “Chiefs” assembled to hear Curzon was rarely told.4

Mapping shores of time and place Except for rare exceptions, such as the History of the Imams and Sayyids of Oman written by Salil ibn Razik in the mountains of Oman, the story of the Gulf in the early nineteenth century was one seen and told from perspectives not too different from Curzon’s on the deck of the Argonaut— history from the perspective of an arms-length protectorate, a British history from offshore. The main, if not completely uncontroversial, source for this period of Gulf history remains a massive series of tomes written by a British bureaucrat. J.G. Lorimer’s once-secret Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia contains a dominant narrative, not simply because of his own original research but because of the monumental efforts of British residents and staff who produced the sources he used for his work. His work is matched by yet another monumental product of British imperial writing: The Précis of the Persian Gulf by Jerome Saldanha, Lorimer’s assistant who wrote and compiled summaries of important sources from the Bombay archives between 1904–08.5 Recent revisionist histories of the early nineteenth-century Gulf, while attempting to repaint the past from the perspective of the Gulf, do not escape these ever-present British sources. In the 1980s, Sultan al-Qasimi wrote his dissertation on The Myth of Arab Piracy in the Gulf while a PhD student at the University of Exeter. He countered the label of “piracy” given by the British to the Qasimi, arguing that the British were simply trying to increase their share of Gulf–India trade at the expense of local Arab traders, especially the Qasimi of the Lower Gulf. While adding to the debate, his book, like the work of almost every Gulf scholar of this period, was unavoidably based upon and influenced by the very British sources he critiques.6 Charles E. Davies’ The Blood Red Arab Flag: An Investigation into Qasimi Piracy, 1797–1820, in contrast, did not avoid the label of piracy and shows the range of opinions and perspectives about this period.7 Regardless of how one defined piracy, for the British perspective, it was clear predation on shipping, for the Qasimi the raids were possibly assertion of their view of commercial and local rights, the British may have had an advantage in their bureaucratic papermaking. They thus formed much of the raw stuff of protectorate and pre-protectorate Gulf history. 18

The pre-protectorate period: 1790–1853

Before 1820, the British navy and British merchants such as Samuel Manesty, the British resident in Basra, were outmatched by the local maritime knowledge of the Qasimi.8 These Qasimi, as well as other Arabic-speaking tribes settled along the Gulf on both the Persian and Arab sides, had an intimate understanding of the shifting sandbanks, shallows, Pearl banks, and hazards of the shallow sea. Imperial powers going back to Babylon and Persia faced the same problem as the British: despite some wealth in pearls and possibly dates and iron from Oman, the Gulf itself was somewhat sparsely populated and, for most imperial powers, deemed not worth the enormous investment needed to control it directly. At the same time, the Gulf was crucial as a maritime route connecting Mesopotamia with the Subcontinent. In dealing with the Qasimi, as well as other raiders, the British at first took a hands-off approach, ordering their warships not to fire until fired upon. They also formed an alliance with the Sultan of Oman, hoping that would end the threat. Several spectacular attacks, including in 1816 on the East India Company’s Deriah Dowlat and the subsequent embarrassing ineffective response by British ships off Ras al Khaimah, however, compelled the British to send more ships to resist and to solidify their grasp on the trade route through the Gulf. In 1819, Captain Francis Loch sailed from Plymouth in command of the HMS Eden with orders to pursue and destroy. He soon discovered the reasons why previous British warships had such a difficult time against coastal raiders. The Gulf vessels were simply faster, and better at maneuvering. Captain Loch said as much in his logs:  The superior manner in which the sails were cut and set, as well as the rig of the masts and the form of the hulls, bespoke them at once to be pirate vessels. All was now crowded in chase, they using every exertion to run across our bow and get before the wind.9 Eventually the Eden was close enough to fire and the wind died down. She remained unmoved. The Arab vessels, with light sails made of cloth from the region, moved out of range just in time to evade capture or destruction. Recent, detailed scholarship and reconstruction of traditional and historical Gulf ships has confirmed many of these advantages.10 In his book, The Pirate Coast, Sir Charles Belgrave, who served the Sheikh of Bahrain from 1926–56, described these local adaptations that allowed smaller “pirate” ships to run circles around European naval technology. It was clear to Loch that the Arab vessels: had many advantages over the heavier, slower European built men-of-war and merchant ships. They were faster and more easily handled, and there was nothing about the weather or the sea which the men who sailed them did not know. The Arab-built ships were shallower, drawing less water, and their captains were familiar with all the uncharted islands and innumerable shoals and reefs which made navigation on both coasts of the Gulf so difficult and dangerous. Even when she was several miles from the shore, the Eden could only proceed slowly, constantly swinging the lead, and sometimes sending a boat ahead to take soundings.11 Eventually, Loch simply gave up on trying to approach the smaller ships from the Eden itself. He had to send off smaller boats in pursuit. Captain Loch’s mission had mixed results, with the main realization being that the British would need to resort to diplomatic solutions, as opposed to force. But by the middle of the nineteenth century, the British had made up somewhat for some their lack of local knowledge 19

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of the Gulf by literally putting its shores on the map. They had made the first, detailed, scientific navigational charts of the treacherous Gulf shore. While the Ottomans, Dutch, and ʿAbbasids all had maps as well, none were of the same quality as the British charts, nor at the granular level of detail; this was the level of knowledge needed to mitigate the “home field advantage” of the Gulf and to put the British in a position to enforce a “maritime truce” that would be advantageous to them and to those Sheikhs who agreed to go along with the terms of the their treaty. The year 1820, the midpoint of the period discussed in this chapter, was thus the beginning of a turning point in Gulf history for multiple reasons. The first General Maritime Treaty was signed. It was an agreement, variously enforced, which prohibited piracy in the Gulf and required the ships of the “pacified Arabs” to fly a white flag with a red rectangle to symbolize their peace with the British government. Perhaps even more importantly, however, it was also in that year that three British ships, the Discovery, Psyche, and Benares started their detailed soundings, charting, and surveying of the currents, shoals, and labyrinthine shores of what was often called the “Pirate Coast” stretching from Ras Musandam to Kuwait. The element of surprise, and the ability to disappear and regroup, which produced the aura of invincibility that had served to keep the Gulf Arabs free from outside rule for centuries, was slowly being chipped away with every new line on the map.12 Along with this maritime charting, there were also attempts to chart the various peoples and tribes of the Gulf, to designate particular Gulf leaders responsible for maintaining security. In some cases, this designation merely recognized somewhat established, pre-existing, local power structures, as was the case for the Khalifa of Bahrain. In other cases, such as in Qatar, the British identification of Muhammad al Thani as the leader and representative of all the pearl-fishing tribes and merchants around the town of Bida had major and far-reaching consequences.13 In some cases, the legacy of particular, prominent leaders, such as Rahman ibn Jabr al Jalhami (d. 1826) faded quickly without formal British recognition. Although labeled as a “pirate” like the Qasimi, he scrupulously avoided British shipping, and even allied with Omanis against Saudi Wahhabi influence; he ruled from a various number of ports including Qatif and Khor Hassan in the north of Qatar. During his lifetime, he was one of the most powerful men in the Gulf. Nonetheless, he and his son died in a battle against the Khalifa, dramatically exploding his own ship full of gunpowder to escape capture. There is no line of Rahman ruling today. While rather freewheeling characters such as Rahman could continue to operate well into the 1820s stirring up power arrangements and claims, their era was coming to an end. The interventions of the British in early nineteenth century period solidified existing networks and power relationships, even as they created structures of knowledge, information, and designation. By bringing particular Sheikhs such as the Khalifa, in Kuwait and Bahrain, and the Thani onto British ships to sign treaties, it identified those chiefs and their descendants as the rulers of the Gulf. This scientific categorization of peoples by the British has been the subject of much debate between historians of colonial India. For some, it was analogous to the observing of wave-particles by particle physicists. In the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, a wave-particle was neither a wave nor a particle until it is observed or recorded by an instrument or an observer. The observation, in effect, creates the reality it described. In the same way, many things social, political, tribal, and even geological that were once in a state of being “both” or “many” things in the Gulf, were suddenly seemed to become one or the other in the British sources compiled in the Précis and described in The Gazetteer: either allied Sheikh or a pirate; either a legitimate or illegitimate claimant to land or pearl banks; either a supporter or detractor of British imperial interests. Despite the important influence of the British, Gulf tribes and leaders, however, were not  elementary particles and could not necessarily fit into easily managed categories and the 20

The pre-protectorate period: 1790–1853

identities set out by the British who tried to divide and organize a system of legitimate and illegitimate authority over the Gulf region. The agency of British imperial intervention and categorization can be overestimated, especially in this pre-protectorate period from 1790–1853. Many in the Gulf, from Sultans to Sheikhs to humble pearl divers and Bedouin, found new ways to negotiate and seek advantage, or even to violate treaty terms, begging forgiveness and avoiding outright confrontation with the might of the British navy. While the treaty of 1853 and the rise of steam shipping by no means completely destroyed the ways of the past, it did temper and constrain the tendency to shift boundaries and loyalties that was more the norm before the middle of the century. The British later dealt more seriously with those who disobeyed their policy of enforcing peace at sea. This engrossing and even swashbuckling history from off shore, the focus on debates over “piracy” versus “local commerce,” obscured important changes deep in Arabia. Despite the natural tendency of British sources to emphasize maritime history and the ports, the rise of the Qasimi and Arab Protectorate states in the Gulf could not be fully grasped without understanding two major events that occurred far inland.

Wahhabis and Pashas In 1744, Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab, a theologian preaching an absolute adherence to the doctrine of the “unity of God,” formed a pact with Muhammad ibn Saud, the ruler of the Diriyah Oasis in the Nejd, the central region of Arabia. Several scholars have described the extraordinary success of this combination of political, tribal, and religious power. The rise of the Wahhabi movement and the foundation of the Emirate of Diriyah, also called the first Saudi State, was one of the most important events in the modern history of the Middle East, not just Arabia.14 Despite being in the backyard of the Emirate, the Gulf states held out against direct Wahhabi rule. The Qasimi, who became Wahhabi and relied on Wahhabi support, still maintained a level of independence from Diriyah. Gulf Muslims from Bahrain to the lower Gulf refused to become Wahhabi. The Sultan of Oman, as an Ibadi, vigorously fought against Wahhabi conquest, often with British support. The spread and power of the Wahhabis impacted the Gulf in three major ways. First, in resisting the Wahhabis and seeking alliance with the British, Oman was able to justify its rise as a significant regional power. Second, even as Wahhabism organized the peoples of the interior of Arabia, including the Bedouin and Oasis dwellers, many of the eastern coastlands of the Gulf remained relatively autonomous. By never fully committing to the Wahhabi cause, local sheikhs in the ports were able to keep their options open on land, even as the British grew into the dominant power at sea. Third, the Wahhabis eventually induced the Pasha of Egypt, at the behest of the Ottoman Sublime Porte, to invade Arabia. This became one of many major, but ultimately unsustainable, Egyptian interventions in Arabia. The Wahhabi War from 1811–18 overthrew the first Saudi State, removed a powerful ally to the Qasimi, and set the stage for the success of Oman, the influence of the Ottomans in Arabia and the Gulf, and the rise of the Trucial States. It was extraordinary that the Ottoman Sultan and the Pasha of Egypt had not acted earlier. In 1805, the Wahhabis controlled Mecca and Madina, calling into question the Sultan’s claim to the Caliphate and to the custodianship over the two holy cities. They sacked Hussein’s shrine in Karbala. They severely impacted the trade and pilgrimage routes that allowed the Ottoman Empire to function in the region. When the Pasha Mehemet Ali and his Albanian troops intervened, there was no decisive victory. It was only after 1817, under the leadership of Ibrahim Pasha, who used wit and diplomacy with the Bedouin as much as force of arms, that Egypt finally defeated the first Saudi State. In 1818, the Ottomans executed Abdullah ibn Saud, leader 21

Allen James Fromherz

of the Saudi Wahhabis, in Istanbul. This suppression of the Wahhabis weakened the power of the Qasimi and allowed the British an opening in the region. While the Wahhabi War may have seriously weakened the roots of the movement and the Saudi State, new growth emerged from the trunk a century later. Despite being defeated temporarily, the ideas and the preaching of Muhammad ibn al Wahhab were preserved. Although they were exiled for a time to Kuwait, the Saud family did not die out. Wahhabism and the Saud would return as the most significant players of the early twentieth century. Once again, the British contemplated ways to preserve their Trucial States from Saudi ambitions. Once again, the Saudi and Wahhabi doctrine spread well into the Gulf; Qatar voluntarily adopted Wahhabism to pre-empt invasion. Abdul Aziz bin Saud took Al-Hasa on the Gulf coast from the Ottomans in 1913. He established the unified Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1930. The Egyptians returned to the Gulf twenty years after 1818 with Khurshid Pasha’s intervention. It was not until the twentieth century, however, and the rise of Arab nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s when Egypt reasserted itself in the region in a serious way. Nasser of Egypt, “taking another leaf from Mehemet ʿAli’s book” attempted to reach out to the Gulf oilfields, first invading Yemen and then using radio technology to stir up unrest in the region.15 Ultimately, however, Nasser’s adventure was as short-lived as those of his Pasha predecessors. The British maritime and the Egyptian/Ottoman terrestrial interventions in the preprotectorate Gulf share many characteristics. In both cases, imperial powers wished to secure interests in trade and to secure their honor. For the British, responding to the raids on East India Company shipping was crucial to maintaining their position vis-à-vis India and as mistress of the seas. For the Egyptians and the Ottomans, the Gulf was similarly a crucial part of their trade, even as the Wahhabis called into question their claim to the Caliphate and their hypothetical suzerainty over large portions of the land of the Arabian Peninsula. Both the Ottomans and the British used “native agents” and local powers as allies, leading to odd situations where the Ottomans could lay claim to the land of the Sheikh even while the British laid claim to “protecting” the Sheikh’s sea, as was the case with Qatar under Muhammad al Thani and Jassim al Thani. In the end, however, the interests of both the British and the Ottomans were not strong enough to justify the expense of a more complete commitment to the region. The British established the more lasting and durable system, one that created allies from within pre-existing Gulf society and that required only the security of the seas. The protectorate system that emerged, it could be argued, was so successful that it never died. The Carter Doctrine and the guarantee of trade through the Gulf that has been a pillar of US Foreign policy is the present-day manifestation of the treaty system started by the British in the 1820s. Importantly, however, the relationship between the British and their Gulf allies was not necessarily always perfect, and their interests were never really fully aligned. Possibly the most important relationship for the British in the pre-protectorate period was with Oman. It was also a complicated alliance. The Omani maritime empire under the long-lived Sayyid Saʿid bin Sultan (d. 1856) was an example of a power that maintained a state of multivalence and even outright competition and subtle conflict with British interests. The Sultan deftly moved between Zanzibar and Muscat. He formed multiple alliances with the French and even with the Americans who were given favored trading status before the British who had helped the Omanis for so many decades against the Qasimi. The Omani perspective was rich in known historical sources, due to the history of the Sayyids and Sultans by Ibn Razik mentioned above, as well as recent important research conducted in Omani and Zanzibari archives.16 Omanis were able to maintain their own maritime empire suited to the regional economic relationships of the Indian Ocean. In the end, however, the British denied Oman one of its main sources of supremacy, steam shipping. The account of the British traveler Richard Burton described the fate of the 22

The pre-protectorate period: 1790–1853

Omani empire after the death of Sayyid Saʿid in 1856.17 It was split in two between two brothers and the steam shipping technology promised by the British remained undelivered except for a dysfunctional old engine laying unused in the godowns of Zanzibar.

Early nineteenth-century roots How did fluid and informal societies based largely on lineage, with ill-defined borders and largely informal institutions become the modern states of the Gulf today? This is one of the dominant questions asked by historians of the modern Middle East and the Gulf.18 This chapter shows that it is important to look back much further, before the rise of oil production to the rise of new forms of knowledge, new forms of identification, new forms of transportation, and new ways of mapping reality that all came to influence the Gulf in indelible ways in the early nineteenth century; this was a century before the rise and discovery of oil and decades before the rise of large-scale pearl trading which peaked a century later, at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Persian Gulf before the protectorate was subject, in some ways, to the classic “Khaldunian cycle.” Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406) was the great North African historian and philosopher who suggested that much of history could be viewed as a process of rise and fall as one dynasty with great tribal unity declines and disintegrates, it was replaced by another.19 The migrations and unifications of the Utubi, later called Khalifa, who had an important impact on the rise of Kuwait and Bahrain, the incursions by the Wahhabis and Qasimi, and the assertion of Omani under a powerful Sultan all fit this pattern. The British, and to a much lesser extent the Ottomans and the Egyptians, broke this Khaldunian calculus. They not only described and mapped the Gulf, they also began a process of freezing it, a pattern of state building in a land and in a body of water that had long been defined by the defiance of boundaries and the freedom of movement. It was thus the events of the early nineteenth century, not just the discovery of oil in the early twentieth, that created the foundations of the Gulf states as they exist today.

Notes 1 Lord Curzon, Lord Curzon in India: Being a Selection from his Speeches as Viceroy and Governor-General of India (London: Macmillan and Co., 1906), 500–501. 2 Ibid., 501. 3 Spelled variously in English transliteration as Joasmee, Jawasim, Jowasim, al-Qasimi, Qawasem, Qawasim, Qavasen, etc., with the letters J and Q interchangeable. 4 For a detailed account of the British Gulf from the unique perspective of the “native agents,” see James Onley, The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 5 For the Gazetteer, see John Gordon Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia, Cambridge Archive Editions, 9 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); For the Précis, see Jerome Saldanha, The Précis of the Persian Gulf, Cambridge Archive Editions, 8 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 6 Sultan Muhammad al Qasimi, The Myth of Arab Piracy in the Gulf (London: Routledge, 2016). 7 Charles E. Davies, The Blood Red Arab Flag: An Investigation into Qasimi Piracy, 1797–1820 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997). 8 On the role of Manesty and Basra, see Sir Denis Wright, “Samuel Manesty and his Unauthorized Embassy to the Court of Fath ʿAli Shah,” Iran, vol. 24, (1986): 153–160; and Thabit Abdullah, Merchants, Mamluks and Murder: The Political Economy of Trade in Eighteenth Century Basra (New York: State University of New York Press, 2000). 9 Captain Loch quoted in Charles Belgrave, The Pirate Coast (New York: Roy Publishers, 1966), 56. 10 Abdulrahman al Salimi and Eric Staples, eds., Oman: A Maritime History (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2016).

23

Allen James Fromherz 11 Belgrave, The Pirate Coast, 56. 12 The Qatar Digital Library, an open source compilation of sources on the Gulf, many from the British library, has several excellent examples of these charts as well as an introduction by Magdalena Peszko, “Important Work: The British Survey that Charted the Gulf for the First Time,” Qatar National Library, www.qdl.qa/en/important-work-british-1820-survey-charted-gulf-first-time. 13 For more on Muhammad al-Thani and the British role in the founding of the Thani line, see Allen J. Fromherz, Qatar: A Modern History (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2017). 14 Wabbabis preferred and still prefer the name “Unitarians,” or followers of the absolute unity of God. On the rise of Al-Wahhab, see Madawi al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Michael Crawford, Ibn ‘Abd al Wahhab (London: Oneworld Publications, 2014). 15 J.B. Kelly, “The Future in Arabia,” International Affairs 42, no. 4 (1966): 619–640, 620. 16 Thomas McDow, Buying Time: Debt and Mobility in the Western Indian Ocean (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2018). 17 Richard Burton, Zanzibar: City, Island and Coast, 2 vols. (London: Tinsley, 1872). 18 Frauke Heard-Bey, who worked in the archives of Sheikh Zayed of Abu Dhabi and who wrote the definitive volume on the history of the UAE, focused on this question. She provides a useful overview in Frauke Heard-Bey, “From Tribes to State: The Transformation of Political Structure of Five States of the GCC,” CRISSMA Working Paper no. 15 (Milan: Crissma, 2008); other works include the classic volume edited by Philip Khoury and Joseph Kostiner, Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991). 19 Allen James Fromherz, Ibn Khaldun, Life and Times (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011).

24

4 

Saudi arabia and the 1744  

alliance between the al

Saud and the al-Sheikh

a legitimizing and enduring union Joseph A. Kéchichian Introduction Followers of al-daʿwah ila al-tawhid (the call to the doctrine of the Oneness of God) shun the label “Wahhabists” to identify themselves. They are Muslims who repudiate all innovations and who call themselves Muwahhidun (Unitarians).1 While Muslims believed in tawhid, Central Arabians earned the epithet Salafists on account of more puritan preferences, though few con­ solidated their presence in a specific geographical location, even if the “Wahhabi” state did not officially become the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia until 1932. For all practical purposes, however, a formal Wahhabi nation-state existed in 1744 after two extraordinary men sealed a lasting agreement that remade the Arabian Peninsula. Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab (1703–92) and Muhammad bin Saud (1710–65) forged an effective alliance whose aim was to ensure mutual benefits based on common purposes. What distinguished this particular alliance was the spec­ trum of interests it sought to encompass, running the gamut from the spiritual to the political and that included military and business concerns. According to John S. Habib, the 1744 Pact was a muscular reformation of Islam and, in a sense, the Al Saud empowered the creed by pro­ viding it with “secular” cover, which was necessary to unite Arabia’s tribes.2 The 1744 alliance brought together natural allies that, in hindsight, explained its longevity. To be sure, the union was not always congruent but, notwithstanding the inevitable diver­ gences, the pact endured for 275 years precisely because it was fundamentally harmonious. It served the peoples of Nejd, and later those of the other parts of the Kingdom, even if critics dismissed it as little more than an accord of convenience to serve two isolated and relatively weak entities. For reasons that remained obscure, Nejdis were allegedly incapable of national­ ism, which was incorrect.3 While sparsely populated and subjected to the vagaries of an extremely harsh environment, Central Arabia included pockets of civilization that were significant, albeit not comparable to thriving metropolises like Cairo or Damascus.4 Remarkably, and surrounded by stronger foes, Unitarian tribesmen from Nejd welcomed Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab’s teachings as a good omen, determined to unite for the sake of survival. At the time, Ottomans occupied the Hejaz, extremist Makravid (Ismaʿili) Shiʿa were in Najran, more moderate Zaʾidi Shiʿa survived in the Yemeni highlands, ʿIbadhis thrived in Oman, and the Banu Khalid domi­ nated the Qatar promontory. What Nejdis observed all around them was tribal warfare, fueled 25

Joseph A. Kéchichian

by sectarianism and, even worse, by a slew of believers who worshiped sacred stones and held other unworthy beliefs. In short, all around the Arabian Peninsula, conservative Muslims who favored orthodoxy were ostracized, often dismissed as extremists who pretended to be better believers and who were set in their “successful-business-models.” That was the environment in which Abdul Wahhab gained influence, popularity and, eventually, real power.

Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab was born in either 1703 or 1704 in al-ʿUyaynah, a relatively small Nejdi hamlet, into a learned family.5 Both his father and grandfather were Hanbali judges who, naturally, paved the way for the precocious young man who followed in his ancestors’ footsteps.6 In Medina, where he spent several years studying, the gifted pupil discovered the critical books that were needed to think about the fundamentals. When he traveled to Basra in search of knowledge with established masters, his puritanical views drew the ire of “scholars” and “merchants” who feared that his ideas might gain popularity. The young man was expelled and “staggering along barefoot in the summer heat on the way back to Arabia, he was rescued by a good Samaritan, a donkey-master of the town of al-Zubair.”7 From al-Zubair [a Sunni/ Maliki town north of Kuwait], Abdul Wahhab traveled south along the coast to al-Hasa, where he studied with local scholars and further refined his concepts. Muhammad’s teachings and puritanical outlook were not approved of by his father, who uprooted the family and moved them to the Huraymillah hamlet, where the elder figure passed away in 1741. It was in Huraymillah that Muhammad composed his opus, Kitab al-Tawhid (The Book of God’s Unity), which called believers to return to the uncorrupted religion as it was revealed in the seventh century and practiced by the Prophet and the first Muslims.8 Huraymil­ lah elders disapproved and when Muhammad returned to al-ʿUyaynah, he found its inhabitants to be equally wary of his teachings, aware that his opus included no references to “Islamic Law, which guides Muslims’ everyday lives,” presumably because the “bitter differences with other  Muslims were not over fiqh [jurisprudence] rules at all, but over ʿaqīda, or theological positions.”9

Alliance with Muhammad bin Saud Although the al-ʿUyaynah Governor, ʿUthman bin Muhammad bin Muʿammar, supported Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab, the latter was banished from the hamlet because of pressure exerted from the Banu Khalid (who ruled over Al Ahsah at the time). Abdul Wahhab trekked to the nearby al-Dirʿiyyah settlement, where Muhammad bin Saud ruled, and with whom the “Sheikh” would form a long-lasting alliance. The ruler’s devout wife and brothers persuaded Muhammad bin Saud to welcome the cleric, who taught the Badu about the faith the way the Prophet transmitted. Whether the compact between the two men withstood the test of time because of compromises was difficult to determine. To be sure, both needed each other but, in fact, Abdul Wahhab relied on Muhammad bin Saud to a far greater extent than acknowledged, simply because the preacher was not universally accepted. When, for example, clerics in Riyadh lambasted Abdul Wahhab, it fell on Muhammad bin Saud to back his ally and silence the critics. Likewise, when Ottoman writers disparaged Abdul Wahhab, the Egyptian chronicler ʿAbd alRahman al-Jabarti recalled how many reacted. For al-Jabarti, Abdul Wahhab was a man who “summoned men to God’s book and the Prophets’ Sunna, bidding them to abandon innova­ tions in worship.”10 Unlike Ottoman scribes, however, and after Muhammad bin Saud passed away in 1765, his son Abdul Aziz assumed the burden of power, and upheld the 1744 compact 26

Saudi Arabia and the 1744 alliance

because he believed in Abdul Wahhab’s teachings. Abdul Aziz endured and finally subdued Riyadh in 1773 as the Sheikh retired from his extensive duties. He continued to advise Abdul Aziz until 1792, the year the cleric passed away, though Muhammad Abdul Wahhab devoted most of his later years to teaching. Were it not for Abdul Aziz, however, the Unitarian creed would have withered at the proverbial vine as the Al Saud successfully defended Dirʿiyyah and Riyadh from the marauding Banu Khalid. The latter were not the only attackers as Ismaʿili war­ riors inflicted a severe defeat on the Wahhabis too, although in the mid-1770s, Nejdis rose to the occasion and won against Najran usurpers. These military victories significantly strengthened the Al Saud who, it was critical to note, seldom deviated from Unitarian teachings. Competing tribes were defeated as the Al Saud expanded their realm and, by the end of 1788, the area that came under their control stretched from the Syrian desert to the Valley of the Dawasir, on the edge of the Rubʿ al-Khali (Empty Quarter), and from ʿAbqayq to Qatar. “In 1792, the iconoclasts of Nejd descended on the oasis of al-Qatif,” the center of predominantly Shiʿi villages, where they destroyed and killed at will.11 Subduing the Shiʿa proved to be relatively easy. The real challenge lay in Mecca where the Sharif, Ghalib bin Musaʿid, rejected Unitarian proselytizers. He ordered the arrest of pil­ grims who defended their creed, tortured several leaders, and otherwise distanced his interpreta­ tions of “Mainstream Islam” from Nejdi puritans. In fact, no Wahhabis were allowed in Mecca between 1750 and 1770 and, after a short hiatus when Nejdi pilgrims were allowed to perform their pilgrimage duties, the ban was restored between 1774 and 1788. The Sharif invited Uni­ tarian preachers to return to Mecca in 1788, though the city’s established ʿulamaʾ frowned upon the idea of debating the Sharif’s guests. What followed was a war of words, followed by real clashes, which only ended in 1803 with a Wahhabi victory in Mecca.

Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab’s legacy Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab was 90 years old when he died in 1792 but he left two formid­ able legacies: 1) an unassailable pact; and 2) four qualified sons who followed in their father’s footsteps. Importantly, all four got along fabulously with Abdul Aziz bin Muhammad bin Saud, and when he died later in 1803, with Saud bin Abdul Aziz. Aspiringly, the alliance delivered on its promises, as the Al Saud expanded their realm further across the vast Arabian Peninsula, encompassing Bahrain and the Buraymi Oasis on the strategic crossroads between Oman and the Lower Gulf Sheikhdoms. Dirʿiyyah was not only a center of power for the Al Saud, but also gradually evolved into a source of tribal authority. Arab leaders across the vast peninsula feared Al Saud justice, especially after Sharif Ghalib’s 1803 defeat, which resulted in the wholesale destruction—Unitarians claim the cleansing of the Holy City—of “shrines where people offered prayers to saints rather than to God.”12 In 1805, the Al Saud conquered Medina, where idola­ trous features—some of which were introduced by the Ottomans—were systematically demol­ ished on account of their perversion from the true teachings of the Holy Scriptures.13 This conquest shocked the Ottomans, although al-Jabarti confirmed that Medina was conquered without any fighting.14 Though Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab and Muhammad bin Saud sealed their pact in 1744, the modern foundation of the Unitarian State came about after Abdul Aziz bin Muhammad bin Saud and his son, Saud bin Abdul Aziz bin Muhammad bin Saud ruled, as both were determined to eradicate all traces of Ottoman control throughout the Hejaz. It was critical to note that after al-Ahsah fell to the Al Saud, the Ottoman Governor of Iraq launched a campaign to dislodge the Nejdis, an effort that failed and that led to Al Saud retaliations against the Ottomans in Mesopotamia. While it was true that Al Saud’s methods were particularly harsh, their ultimate 27

Joseph A. Kéchichian

triumph came about as they obtained the allegiances of tribal leaders in ʿAsir and points further south, along with remarkable inroads toward the north, especially in Karbalaʾ (Iraq), where many Shiʿi shrines were systematically smashed.15 Still, both Abdul Aziz bin Muhammad and Saud bin Abdul Aziz bin Muhammad set administrative markers everywhere they went, includ­ ing the appointment of governors and judges, which ushered in a sense of permanence as stability and security—two key ingredients in the harsh desert environment—spread. These preferences, for there were deliberate initiatives, earned the Al Saud what few of their prede­ cessors had secured, namely, the respect of fiercely independent Badu. In fact, the Arabian Pen­ insula was gradually pacified, both through law and order, as well as military discipline topped with spiritual guidance, as best recorded by a leading historian.16 This was not the only avowal of growing Al Saud influence in Arabia. John Gordon Lorimer, the renowned British Political Resident who was stationed in Bushire (Iran), and who traveled extensively throughout the region before he produced one of the most complete histories of the Arabian Peninsula, wrote that: The tendency of the Wahhabi government in Najd … was essentially civilizing. Among the principle objects kept in view were the establishment of law and order, the suppression of local wars and private feuds, and the substitution for the latter of stateinflicted punishments and state-awarded compensation.17 Both of these testimonies highlighted seldom acknowledged advances, namely, that Al Saud law and order tasks, no matter how severe, were largely motivated by anti-Ottoman policies. Indeed, it may be safe to surmise that the Al Saud brought forth concrete anti-colonial Arab nationalist sentiments long before Levantines discovered the phenomenon, and organized their revolts against the occupiers. Regrettably, the much stronger Ottoman army under the command of Muhammad ʿAli as well as Tusun bin Muhammad ʿAli, a son of the Viceroy of Egypt, occupied Mecca and Medina, even if Saud bin Abdul Aziz displayed exceptional military verve and put up a fierce fight. His death in 1814 denied the Al Saud of a capable commander. Abdallah bin Saud opted for caution and barricaded himself in al-Dirʿiyyah, a fatal mistake when open country and his warriors’ unparalleled expertise in desert warfare could have secured victory against the attacking Ottomans. Instead, Ibrahim Pasha, another son of Muhammad ʿAli, laid a six-months-long siege to al-Dirʿiyyah, which strangulated Abdallah bin Saud and forced him to surrender in September 1818. The fallen leader was taken to Constantinople (Istanbul), where he was unceremoniously decapitated in 1819, an incident that was permanently etched in the Al Saud psyche. Consequently, the first Al Saud law and order compact accepted by Arabian Badu came to an end.18

The second Al Saud monarchy Between 1818 and 1840, the Al Saud endured systematic repression, starting with the total destruction of al-Dirʿiyyah by Ibrahim Pasha’s Ottoman levies.19 Dozens of Al Saud family members were carted off to Cairo and Constantinople, which changed its name to Istanbul in 1930. After Abdallah bin Saud bin Abdul Aziz, few expected the ruling family to put its house in order and regain authority, although a remarkable cousin of the fallen ruler rose to the occa­ sion. Turki bin Abdallah, a cousin of Abdul Aziz bin Muhammad, re-established the Al Saud in nearby Riyadh starting in 1824 as Muhammad ʿAli’s troops redeployed from the Nejd to the Hejaz essentially to control the two Holy Cities.20 Turki was an exceptional leader, a prince who lacked the realm that a titled ruler required, but someone who understood that one did not 28

Saudi Arabia and the 1744 alliance

simply impose order through a sword. “He severely condemned the sin of oppressing the sub­ jects of the state and warned that the penalty would be deposition from office and exile,” which was sufficient to bring local governors under control.21 What he advocated was the application of religious principles that, he firmly believed, legitimized Al Saud authority. Prince Turki was assassinated in 1834 though his oldest son, Faysal, proved to be equally worthy of his title. As Muhammad ʿAli feared Faysal bin Turki and what he might accomplish, the Cairenes re-occupied Nejd, defeated Faysal in 1838, and transferred his prisoner to Egypt. Extraordinar­ ily, Faysal bin Turki escaped from his Cairo prison in 1843 and managed to return through a harrowing journey to Riyadh, where he re-launched his reign. In Lorimer’s broad assessment, Faysal bin Turki was: distinguished by his dignity and self-possession and was respected for the justice of his decisions, but he was greatly feared, especially by the Bedouins, on account of his merciless severity. … In his dominions Faisal seems to have maintained perfect order, and from the very first year of his reign he showed great energy in protecting the yearly pilgrimages to the Holy Cities against marauding Bedouins.22 A nationalist leader in the true sense of the term, Faysal was content, and ruled until 1865. His successors confronted a return of the Ottomans, whose troops hemmed the Al Saud between the Hejaz and, after 1871, the North/Eastern region. Even worse, Al Saud rivals in Nejd, the Al Rashid, gained ground between 1891 and 1902. Tribal differences between the Al Saud and the Al Rashid, both of which espoused the Unitarian creed and shared an open competition for power, translated into an unmistakable rivalry. In any event, the Al Rashid prevailed, which weighed heavily on Faysal bin Turki’s youngest son, Abdul Rahman, in Riyadh. In 1891, Abdul Rahman and several family members—including the eleven-year-old Abdul Aziz bin Abdul Rahman—went into exile, accepting Al Sabah protection in Kuwait. It was important to emphasize that the second Saudi State, like its predecessor, was based on the 1744 alliance between the ʿulamaʾ and the umarah (princes) too. Abdul Aziz bin Abdul Rahman al-Faysal Al Saud was aware of the pact and it may be argued that he matured his per­ spectives during his Kuwait sojourn from 1891 to 1902, when he observed how the Al Sabah ruled. At the age of twenty-two, the young man embarked on the adventure of a lifetime with what were truly rudimentary means, supported by a few seasoned warriors. When he returned to Central Arabia to reclaim his authority, his goal was to simply restore Al Saud rule. By all accounts, he faced major challenges, operated against the odds and, truth be told, victory was not guaranteed. His armor was his faith and, motivated by a raw determination to succeed, Abdul Aziz set out to change history.23 Although Abdul Aziz bin Abdul Rahman threw the Ottomans out of al-Ahsah and al-Qatif in 1913, his far greater accomplishment at the time was his efforts to introduce hijrahs, towns that combined military cantonments with agricultural set­ tlements, to keep the Badu from their uncoordinated treks. The gel that kept the unruly masses glued was the missionary goal of spreading Unitarian values, which was the reason why the settlers became Ikhwan (brothers). For one scholar, the rise of opposition groups within the Wahhabi movement was the result of unholy compromises, which the Saudi clergy apparently engaged in, even when its leaders knew that supporting the state “conflicted with their religiously based convictions.”24 This logic implied that the Al Saud coerced the al-Sheikh, which was not the case, and that successive monarchs muzzled the religious establishment. While powerful rulers like Turki bin Faysal and Abdul Aziz bin Abdul Rahman were diehard nationalists and uncompromising, they accepted the clergy’s role within Saudi society, not only because that backing strengthened their own 29

Joseph A. Kéchichian

legitimacies but also because doing so enhanced internal stability. It is facile to describe the rela­ tionship as determined by pragmatism whereas, in reality, it was motivated by conscious separa­ tion of authority. Another scholar, Guido Steinberg, lamented that Wahhabi clerics failed to develop “a comprehensive political theory” but there was no need for one since the Unitarian creed applied the Quran.25 Believers connected with Ahmad bin Taymiyyah’s teachings within Hanbali traditions that, to say the least, was already theoretical enough as brilliantly deciphered by Henri Laoust in his opus.26 Moreover, these Unitarians held the view that obedience was due to the imam, as long as he did not require his subjects to disobey God or the Shariʿa. For Laoust, “Le devoir d’obéissance à l’imam est devenu l’un des principes les plus essentiels de la sociologie politique du Wahhabisme” [“The duty of obedience to the Imam has become one of the most essential principles of the political sociology of Wahhabism”], which further sealed existing relationships and that was what the Ikhwan practiced—even if reluctantly.27 In fact, Ibn Taymiyyah counseled that “sixty years with a tyrannical imam [were] better than one night without him,” which was applied within the volatile tribal environment with the utmost care, but this was done not only to subdue unruly hordes but also to gradually espouse law and order—the two vital ingredients for a relatively healthy society.28 Earlier, and in the aftermath of the power struggle over succession to Faysal bin Turki in 1865, the ʿulamaʾ sided with Abdullah bin Faysal rather that Saud bin Faysal, ostensibly because the latter had left the Unitarian community. It may well be true that senior clerics feared sedition (fitnah) and found solace in a stronger leader, but the primary motives for their actions was the necessity to unite against the overwhelming Ottoman foe that determined all political and military reactions. Guido Steinberg questioned this interpretation but it was not a mystery since it was, in reality, a fully-fledged commitment to the legitimate authority of a Saudi ruler against a usurper.29 This was more or less the same dilemma that confronted Abdul Aziz bin Abdul Rahman in the first two decades of the twentieth century as he consolidated his power base and, in time, subdued the Ikhwan as the ruler embarked on one of the greatest nation-building efforts on the Arabian Peninsula.

Impact on the modern state To be sure, while several scholars doubted the details on the Unitarian movement, at least those based on the “standard Saudi-Wahhabi narrative of a founder-hero[,] Ibn Saʿud, who had the brilliant idea of settling the bedouin and canalising their military energies [to be] too perfect to be true,” it was inane to always assume that everything had to be immensely complicated to receive academic imprimatur.30 Because Wahhabi doctrine possessed “a political theory, based on the views of Ibn Taymiyya, which require[d] Muslims to obey the ruler,” it was critical to evaluate the long-term consequences of Unitarian practices on the Kingdom after the founding of the Third Monarchy in 1932. Notwithstanding perceived shortcomings, or revisionist mechanisms best left to skilled pseudo-academic mediums, the rise of the Ikhwan after 1912 posed an undeniable threat to the very state Abdul Aziz bin Abdul Rahman sought to establish on the Peninsula. There was—and continues to flourish as a phantasmagoric tale—a mistaken assumption that the hujars (settlers) were not Unitarian or, at least, did not enjoy the benefit of Wahhabi teachings, which clergy­ men presumably took upon themselves to remedy. On the contrary, and by their very nature, the Badu were men of the land and the overwhelming majority were Muslims who followed the Unitarian creed. In fact, most turned out to be royalists par excellence, who also perceived their own special roles in the affairs of the nascent monarchy—the kind of political function that no sovereign could possibly share. It was a forgone conclusion that Abdul Aziz would eventually 30

Saudi Arabia and the 1744 alliance

subdue the Ikhwan, which he finally accomplished in 1929 with the express cooperation of the clergy who, truth be told, were equally wary of what Ikhwan members could possibly do to their own influences. Analysts mistakenly assumed that the clerical leadership lost the ability to mediate in the war between the Ikhwan and the Al Saud. Consequently, several concluded that the clergy became subservient to the ruling family, which was not correct since the religious establishment upheld the 1744 Pact and seldom allowed their allies to overlook their part of the equation. Similarly, the ruling family factored the influence of the religious authorities in the workings of the monarchy, within clearly defined boundaries that were communicated to senior officials. For it must be underscored that there were no, and could never be, ambivalences on the center of power in 1929 or ever since, and while some dreamed of a puritanical state, the reality was that Abdul Aziz bin Abdul Rahman was a Muslim believer who followed the Unitar­ ian creed and would not allow anyone to outmaneuver him to wrestle power from the Al Saud. To be sure, the ruler’s relationships with clerics were not always easy but Abdul Aziz neverthe­ less successfully managed a plethora of opinions and interpretations to flourish. Saudi religious scholars were thus able, and many continued over the years, to influence critical social policies but always with utmost care as the Al Saud insisted on the gradual development of state interests. Consequently, it was safe to state that the writ of religious authorities was limited, and that they were prudently but convincingly persuaded not to oppose Abdul Aziz’s overtures to the rest of the world, not to object to the development of oil fields, and not to resist vital military accords with leading global powers, all of which required the presence of foreigners throughout the country.31 It was imperative to further address how the founder of the Third Monarchy perceived the role of the Ottoman Empire as the later collapse at the end of World War I. As Peter Mansfield argued in his opus, The Arabs, Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab regarded the Turks to be morally corrupt, adding “that the Ottoman sultans had forfeited their right to the caliphate” and, con­ sequently, to the much touted leadership of global Islam.32 Few doubted that the overwhelming majority of Arabs disliked Ottomans after nearly five centuries of often-brutal occupation, including in the Hejaz, even when local satrapies did the Porte’s bidding. In fact, and while it may be fashionable to imply that “Arabs suffered from an immense inferiority complex,” in reality what the Al Wahhab–Al Saud 1744 Pact released was latent nationalism that Abdul Aziz bin Abdul Rahman had preserved and propagated.33 Arabs in general, and Unitarians in par­ ticular, neither suffered from an inferiority complex nor did they have racist tendencies. What they backed was a puritanical interpretation of scriptures. Unitarian clergymen taught believers not to rely on collaborators allegedly because they were impure. They also condemned seeking help from people rather than God, imploring saints and other intermediaries to gain access to God, and foregoing blessings that some Muslims believed could be obtained by visiting the tomb of a holy person.34 What was critical to note here was that these recommendations were made for Unitarians. In other words, even if Wahhabis considered believers who espoused these precepts for certified inclusion in the Unitarian creed, those who were not Unitarians did not have to apply them. For them, tawhid did not have room for saints, and while some clerics imposed harsh interpretations to those who deviated, this was not the basis of dogma but of traditions that more or less applied to Nejdis.

Conclusion Notwithstanding the harsh criticisms that “Wahhabism [is] an intolerant, supremacist sect which, … in claiming to be the ‘pure’ and ‘true, reformed Islam,’ regrettably distorts and mis­ represents the Muslim faith,” a judicious discussion required specialists to take note that 31

Joseph A. Kéchichian

“between 1914 and 1926, Ibn Saud and the Wahhabi leadership exhorted the Ikhwan to moderate their attitude toward other Najdis living under Saudi rule.”35 As a leading scholar reiterated, “between 1926 and 1930, a handful of Ikhwan leaders rebelled against and attempted to overthrow Ibn Saud” that, to say the least, was the Ikhwan’s undoing.36 Just like his prede­ cessors who entered into the 1744 Pact, Abdul Aziz consistently upheld the accord, and emu­ lated them when he was appalled by the reticence of some to accept his authority. He dispensed his justice and secured the throne. Equally consistent criticisms of harsh Wahhabi behavior were attributed to the fact that women were prohibited from driving cars, where sorcery and magic were banned, where Val­ entine’s Day celebrations were perceived to be immoral and decadent, and where every aspect of life was allegedly “controlled” by Wahhabism.37 For David Dean Commins, for example, lifting the ban on Saudi women to get behind the wheel “would infuriate the religious establish­ ment,” even if nothing happened when Riyadh went ahead with its policy to do just that on June 24, 2018.38 Within a year, driving became a blasé development, as few looked askance on  who was driving, focusing instead on traffic that was, to say the least, a very positive development. These were not the only scholars who offered harsh criticisms and whose predictions failed to materialize. As stated earlier but is worth repeating, Hamid Algar, a Professor Emeritus of Persian Studies at the University of California (Berkeley), where he taught Persian and Arabic literature and the contemporary history of Iran and Turkey for 45 years (1965–2010), believed that Wahhabism was “essentially a movement without pedigree.” Algar affirmed that the move­ ment “came out of nowhere in the sense not only of emerging from the wastelands of Najd, but also [displayed a] lack of substantial precedent in Islamic history.”39 This was revealing on several levels because Nejd was not a wasteland and the faction did not lack precedent. Moreover, if one were to accept Algar’s erroneous interpretation, the mere fact that such an association could emerge in the Nejd, negated the assertion of a wasteland since it, presumably, allowed for the birth of a dramatic new perspective. As discussed above, the movement contained subtle but substantive nationalist features, even if, for the phrenic, “the Wahhabi ideology had nothing to do with nationalism, and it is questionable whether a Saudi nation exists even now.”40 Beyond polemical discourses, “Wahhabis were known as … the Ahl al-Tawhid, ‘the people of monotheism,’ those proclaiming ad-dawa lil tawhid.” J.L. Burckhardt, a Swiss explorer, believed Wahhabis to be “an extraordinary people” and, as stated in the introduction, Saudis refused to call themselves Wahhabis, not only because they considered the very idea of worship­ ing through Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab as shirk (heresy), but also because few associated with any of the modernizing features added by the doctors of law.41 Most, if not all, preferred the term Muwahhidun or, alternatively, that of Salafiyyun (traditionalists), those who emulated the pious Companions of the Prophet at the faith’s genesis. As George Rentz emphasized, Uni­ tarianism gave way to genuine teachings of tawhid, which detractors found troubling.42 Instead, opponents of the movement concentrated on the ban to play music in public, the imposition of wearing of a full-niqab to cover women’s faces, entrusting females to a mahram that treat women as juveniles, the banned Ikhtilat, the mixing of genders and, worse, the intolerance of others. Yet, by recognizing religious pluralism in the 2003 National Dialogues, the Al Saud demon­ strated that they possessed the power to subordinate the Wahhabi mission to dynastic interest, a step that also “implied a judgment that Wahhabism could no longer provide a sufficient founda­ tion for the dynasty’s legitimacy.”43 As Commins affirmed, this perspective most likely repres­ ented a strategic choice by the Al Saud to develop a durable system of pluralism, since “much of Wahhabism’s twentieth-century experience has been the story of trade-offs for the sake of consolidating the position of its political guardian.”44 In any event, what the now 275-year-old 32

Saudi Arabia and the 1744 alliance

alliance corroborated was its durability and strength as it ushered in more or less permanent stability on the Arabian Peninsula—a development that added to the ruling family’s intrinsic legitimacy and, notwithstanding shortcomings, its contributions to the Saudi nation’s independence.

Notes 1 Views and opinions contained herein are the author’s and should not be attributed to any officials affili­ ated with the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, any Saudi Arabian national, or the Government of Saudi Arabia. The author is solely responsible for any errors that remain in the docu­ ment. Although erroneous, even heretical for some, and emblematic for others, the term Wahhabi is used in this essay without prejudice, which is why it is frequently interchanged with Muwahhidun/ Unitarians. 2 John S. Habib, Ibn Saʿud’s Warriors of Islam: The Ikhwan of Najd and Their Role in the Creation of the Saʿudi Kingdom (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1978), 3–7. 3 Hamid Algar, Wahhabism: A Critical Essay (Oneonta: Islamic Publications International, 2002), 29; see also Arnold J. Toynbee, Civilization on Trial (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948). 4 Soraya Altorki and Donald P. Cole, Arabian Oasis City: The Transformation of ‘Unayzah (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1989), 15–31; see also Soraya Altorki and Donald P. Cole, “Unayzah, le ‘Paris du Najd’: le changement en Arabie saoudite,” Maghreb-Machrek, no. 156 (1997): 3–22; Fuhayd al-Dari bin Rashid and Wadiʿ al-Bustani, Nubdah Tarikhiyyah ʿan Najd [Historical Fragment About Nejd] (Riyadh: Manshurat dar al-Yamamah lil-Bahth wal-Tarjimah wal-Nashr, 1966); and ʿAbd al-ʿAziz ʿAbd al-Ghani Ibrahim, Siraʿ al-Umara’: ʿAlaqat Najd bil-Quwa al-Siyasiyyah fil-Khalij al-ʿArabi 1800–1870—Dirasah Withaqiyyah [Struggle of the Amirs: Nejd’s Relations with the Political Powers in the Arabian Gulf 1800–1870—A Documentary Study] (London: Dar al-Saqi, 1992). 5 The key study on the cleric is Husayn Ibn Ghannam, Kitab Rawdat al-Afkar wal-Afham li-Murtad Hal al-Imam wa Tiʿdad Ghazawat Dhawi al-Islam, ed. Nasir al-Din Al-Asad under the title Tarikh Najd [The History of Nejd] (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 1985); ʿUthman bin ʿAbdallah bin Bishr al-Hanbali, ʿUnwan al-Majd fi Tarikh Najd [The Glorious History of Nejd] (Beirut: Matbaʿat al-Sadir, 1967); and Henri Laoust, “Ibn Abd al-Wahhab,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., eds. P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and W.P. Heinrichs (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1998), 123–130. According to one source, al-ʿUyaynah’s population may have stood at around 25,000 around the time of ʿAbdul Wahhab, which put to rest the Algar canard that Nejd was a “wasteland”. See H.A.R. Gibb and J.H. Kramers, Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam (Leiden: E.J. Brill and Luzac & Co., 1961), 618; and Algar, Wahhabism, 10. 6 The Hanbali school, the smallest of four major Sunni Schools of Jurisprudence known in Arabic as Usul al-Fiqh, is one of four such traditional institutions (the other three are the Hanafi, Maliki, and Shafiʿi schools). It is named after the Iraqi scholar Ahmad bin Hanbal (d. 855). The school derives Shariʿa Law predominantly from the Quran, the Hadiths of the Prophet, and the views of the Sahabah (Muham­ mad’s Companions). A conservative school, Hanbalism does not accept jurist discretion or customs of a community as a sound basis to derive Islamic Law, which the other three institutions permit. 7 George Rentz, “Wahhabism and Saudi Arabia,” in The Arabian Peninsula: Society and Politics, ed. Derek Hopwood (London: George Allen and Unwin Limited, 1972), 55. 8 Muhammad bin ʿAbdul Wahhab, Kitab al-Tawhid [The Book of God’s Unity: Essay on the Unicity of Allah, or what is due to Allah from His Creatures], trans. by Ismail Raji al-Farruqi (n.p., 1981). 9 Frank E. Vogel, Islamic Law and Legal Systems: Studies of Saudi Arabia (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2000), 76. 10 ʿAbdul Rahman bin Hasan al-Jabarti, ʿAqa’id al-Athar fil al-Tarajim wal-Akhbar (Cairo: Dar al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyyah, 1999), 348. 11 Rentz, “Wahhabism and Saudi Arabia,” 58. 12 Ibid., 59. 13 R. Bayly Winder, Saudi Arabia in the Nineteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1965), 1–15; see also Natana J. DeLong-Bas, Wahhabi Islam: From Revival and Reform to Global Jihad (Oxford: Oxford Univer­ sity Press, 2004), 7–40. 14 David Dean Commins, The Mission and the Kingdom: Wahhabi Power Behind the Saudi Throne (London: I.B. Tauris, 2016), 31. 15 Yitzhak Nakash, The Shiʿis of Iraq (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 18–23. 16 David George Hogarth, Arabia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1922), 103–104.

33

Joseph A. Kéchichian 17 John Gordon Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia, vol. 1, part 1B (Farnbor­ ough and Ireland: Gregg International and Irish University Press, 1970), 1064. 18 Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, 1085–1093. 19 It was critical to also note that, after 1820, Muhammad ʿAli treated Wahhabi scholars harshly too, because he genuinely feared their power and potential influence beyond Nejd. Among those targeted was Sulayman bin ʿAbdallah Al al-Sheikh (1785–1818), the leading scholar at the time, who was tor­ tured and executed. See Elizabeth M. Sirriyeh, “Wahhabis, Unbelievers and the Problems of Exclusiv­ ism,” British Society for Middle Eastern Studies Bulletin 16, no. 2 (1989): 123–132. 20 Hussah Ahmad ʿAbdul Rahman, Al-Dawlah Al-Saʿudiyyah Al-Thaniyyah wa Bilad Gharb al-Khalij wa Janibihah, 1849–1891 (Riyadh: Maktabat al ʿUbaykan, 1996), 43–54. 21 ʿAbdul Rahman, Al-Dawlah Al-Saʿudiyyah, 59. See also Rentz, “Wahhabism and Saudi Arabia,” 62. 22 Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, 1109. 23 Michael Darlow and Barbara Bray, Ibn Saud: The Desert Warrior Who Created the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2010), 58–103. 24 Guido Steinberg, “The Wahhabi Ulama and the Saudi State: 1745 to the Present,” in Saudi Arabia in the Balance: Political Economy, Society, Foreign Affairs, eds. Paul Aarts and Gerd Nonneman (London: Hurst, 2005), 11. 25 Ibid., 16.  

26 Henri Laoust, Essai sur les doctrines sociales et politiques de Taki-d-Din Ahmad B. Taimiya (Cairo: Institut   

Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 1939). 27 Ibid., 527. 28 Ibid. 29 Steinberg, “The Wahhabi Ulama and the Saudi State,” 18–19. 30 Ibid., 21; see also Terence Ward, “Arabia of the Wahhabis,” The Wahhabi Code: How the Saudis Spread Extremism Globally (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2018). 31 Steinberg, “The Wahhabi Ulama and the Saudi State,” 25–26. 32 Peter Mansfield, The Arabs (London: Penguin, 1976), 156. 33 Simon Ross Valentine, Force and Fanaticism: Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia and Beyond (London: Hurst, 2015), 36; see also DeLong-Bas, Wahhabi Islam, 227–234 and 246–256; and Commins, The Mission and the Kingdom, 80–103. 34 Valentine, Force and Fanaticism, 178. For a complete and thorough explanation of Wahhabi doctrine, see David S. Margoliouth, “Wahhabiya” in Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam, eds. Gibb and Kramers, 618–621. 35 Valentine, Force and Fanaticism, xxi; see also Commins, The Mission and the Kingdom, 85. 

36 Commins, The Mission and the Kingdom, 85. 

37 Valentine, Force and Fanaticism, 2. 

38 Commins, The Mission and the Kingdom, xiii. 

39 Algar, Wahhabism, 10. 

40 Ibid., 29.  

41 J.L. Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahabys, Collected During His Travels in the East, vol. 1

(London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831), 181. 42 George Rentz, “The Wahhabis,” in Religion in the Middle East, vol. 2, ed. A.J. Arberry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969, 2008), 270–284. 43 Commins, The Mission and the Kingdom, 208. For a discussion of the National Dialogues, see Joseph A. Kéchichian, Legal and Political Reforms in Sa‘udi Arabia (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 62–108. 44 Commins, The Mission and the Kingdom, 208.

34

5 

Britain’s Presence in the  

Persian Gulf, 1617–2019  

W. Taylor Fain

Introduction The British East India Company first established a presence in the Persian Gulf in 1617. More than four centuries later, Britain remains an active participant in Gulf affairs and pursues a com­ bination of strategic and commercial interests in the area in coordination with an array of regional and international actors. The story of Britain’s role in the Gulf is frequently recounted as a story of ascension and declension, but it is more properly a story of transformations. Britain’s presence and participation in the affairs of the Gulf remained constant; however, as its strategic and eco­ nomic motivations and aims have evolved over the years, so did the tactics, methods, and institu­ tions it established to secure its interests. These reflected the larger contours of Britain’s global role and policies and were shaped by a changing cast of allies and adversaries. British merchants, strategists, and India, Colonial, and Foreign Office officials understood the Persian Gulf as part of a larger strategic and economic whole that spanned the arc from India through Arabia to East Africa along the rim of the Indian Ocean, and they crafted their policies accordingly. Moreover, they appreciated that the larger powers of the Gulf region—Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq—shaped the relationships they established with the small sheikhdoms of the Gulf. Meanwhile, the rulers of the protected states along the Gulf’s littoral pursued their own ambitions by co-opting British power in the service of their dynastic and territorial projects. Just as importantly, outside actors, especially the United States, created opportunities and challenges for British policies in the Persian Gulf. Working at different times to undermine or subsidize Britain’s presence in the Gulf, the United States later played a key role in reshaping the Gulf’s security environment after Britain’s abandonment in 1971 of its permanent military presence there. In the early twenty-first century, however, Britain took steps to revitalize its strategic presence in the Gulf against the background of the Islamic State’s and Iran’s emergence as potent threats to the Gulf Arab states, the United States’ “pivot to Asia,” and London’s search for a new international role after Brexit.

Establishing and building a British presence (1617–1914) Britain’s initial foray into the Persian Gulf was commercial, but by the end of the eighteenth century, the Gulf’s strategic value to the security of India was firmly established in the minds of 35

W. Taylor Fain

British policy makers in Bombay and London. The British East India Company established Persian trading posts (or factories) in Shiraz, Isfahan, and Jask in 1617 and 1618.1 Four years later, following a cooperative effort with Shah Abbas the Great to expel the Portuguese from Hormuz, it established its regional headquarters at Bandar Abbas. For the remainder of the seventeenth century, the British competed with the Dutch for commercial advantage in the Gulf, but the Persian trade grew unprofitable, and the Bandar Abbas factory shuttered in 1763. The company’s political agency moved to Basra, where there had been a factory since 1723.2 The fortunes of the British East India Company changed dramatically after the middle of the eighteenth century, and consequently the value of the Persian Gulf to Britain was transformed. Following the effective expulsion of France from India in 1765, the Company became not just a commercial enterprise but a territorial power with extensive political and military interests in South Asia. As a result, the Gulf soon became an outer bulwark of India’s defense. The invasion of northern India by Zaman Shah of Afghanistan and Napoleon Bonaparte’s military venture in Egypt, both in 1798, seemed to underscore the vulnerability of the Company’s Indian posses­ sions, and the British government moved rapidly to establish a robust diplomatic presence in the Gulf region in support of the Company’s interests. London worked to improve relations with Persia, signed a treaty with the Sultan of Muscat to exclude French influence from his territories, and opened a diplomatic mission in Baghdad.3 Meanwhile, predations on Indian commercial shipping in the Gulf by the naval forces of the local tribes, a practice the government of India characterized as “piracy,” prompted the British Governments of Bombay and India to seek the intervention of the Royal Navy on their behalf. Expeditions in 1809 and 1820 against the Qawasim, a group of powerful tribes of the southern Gulf coast, produced the General Treaty for the Cessation of Plunder and Piracy by Land and Sea. A number of the region’s most influential sheikhs signed it, and fifteen years later, the British persuaded them to approve a more general Maritime Truce, which was renewed regu­ larly, culminating in the conclusion of the 1853 “Perpetual Maritime Truce” agreement. The sheikhdoms of the southern Gulf were afterwards referred to collectively as the Trucial Coast, and the term “Pirate Coast” faded from use.4 British naval power was crucial to the establish­ ment the Truce and served as a powerful instrument of British policy in the Gulf during these years. It undergirded the early years of the Pax Britannica there and inspired the historian J.B. Kelly to write that:  Command of the Sea is the prerequisite of power in the Persian Gulf … By the second quarter of the nineteenth century [Britain’s] position there was unassailable, and from that time forward the guardianship of the Gulf rested in British hands.5 The British appreciated that the security of their Gulf interests did not exist in a vacuum and depended on their ability to secure the areas peripheral to it. In 1839, the Royal Navy occupied Aden at the western tip of Arabia. This gave the British a prize much coveted for its excellent port facilities, its proximity to the Arabian coffee country, and its location along the recently proposed Suez to Bombay steamship route. Most importantly, though, Aden provided a base from which the British could exercise influence in the Arabian Peninsula and counter Egyptian threats to their interests on the Persian Gulf coast.6 During these years, the British established the bureaucratic institutions necessary to secure its position and power in the Gulf. In the 1820s, the British Government of Bombay, overseen by the British East India Company, created the post of Resident of the Persian Gulf, rechris­ tened in the 1850s Political Resident in the Persian Gulf. Originally headquartered in Bushire on the southwestern coast of Persia, the Resident’s headquarters moved to Bahrain in 1946. 36

Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1617–2019

Subordinate to the Resident, a number of political Agents were appointed to each of the indi­ vidual sheikhdoms. The responsibilities of these Agents were to “monitor and protect British interests within their districts, gather intelligence, enforce the terms of the treaties, and cultivate good relations with the rulers.”7 The Pax Britannica in the Persian Gulf evolved in the nineteenth and early twentieth centu­ ries to entail a series of “Exclusive Treaties” between the local rulers and the Government of British India. In exchange for protection from foreign aggression, the rulers ceded to the British the right to conduct their foreign relations and agreed to exclude all foreign powers from direct contact with them. The Exclusive Treaties, enforced by the British Resident in the Persian Gulf and his Agents, became the foundation for Britain’s relationship with its Gulf dependencies and made them protected states. Through them, the Government of India wielded enormous power in the Gulf and eastern Arabia. The Gulf rulers frequently solicited these exclusive arrangements with the British and hoped to use British power to secure their territory, physical safety, and dynastic ambitions. In fact, “the rulers actively sought British protection; the Pax could not have been established in the first place without their approval and support.”8 Dominance in the Persian Gulf was necessary, British and Indian government officials came to believe, if they were to preserve the region’s stability and use it to secure the approaches to British India. Consequently, they transformed the trucial system in the Gulf from a mechanism designed merely to preserve the maritime peace to a system that protected the independence and territorial integrity of its members and insulated India from the designs of foreign powers. The future viceroy of India, George Nathaniel Curzon believed fervently in the value of the Gulf to Indian security and wrote in 1892 that “hundreds of thousands of human beings are secured by this British Protectorate of the Persian Gulf … Were it either withdrawn or destroyed both sea and shores would relapse into … anarchical chaos.”9 The Gulf became a key node in the larger strategic geography of the empire and an important element of British efforts to construct a cordon sanitaire around their possessions in South Asia.  Africa, Arabia, Persia, Afghanistan, Chinese Turkistan, Tibet, and Siam were frontiers of the British Indian Empire: a buffer zone protecting the Raj and its communication links with Britain from the advances of the French, Italians, Germans, Ottomans, and Russians during the height of the Eastern Question and the Great Game.10 The editor of the Times of India opined in 1911 that “British supremacy in India is unquestion­ ably bound up with British supremacy in the Persian Gulf. If we lose control of the Gulf, we shall not rule long in India.”11 At the turn of the twentieth century, fears emerged of German or Russian encroachment on the Gulf and plans to construct military facilities in the region. The British foreign secretary, Lord Lansdown, fulminated that:  we should regard the establishment of a naval base or fortified port in the Persian Gulf by any other Power as a very grave menace to British interests, and we should certainly resist it with all the means at our disposal.12 As the new century dawned, British policy makers were convinced of the Persian Gulf’s central­ ity to their larger imperial strategy in Asia, yet were anxious about what they saw as its vulner­ ability to foreign penetration. They accepted responsibility both for ensuring peace among the disputatious peoples of the Gulf and for defending from foreign attack that “inland sea that marked the eastern boundary of the Arab world and was part of the maritime frontier of India.”13 37

W. Taylor Fain

Britain and Persian Gulf oil (1901–45) The value of the Persian Gulf in British strategic and economic calculations changed profoundly with the discovery of oil in the region. In May 1901, the British entrepreneur William Knox D’Arcy received an oil concession from the Shah of Persia and, in 1908, he established the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC). Five years later, the new APOC oil refinery at Abadan on the northern end of the Gulf began production. In the meantime, British officials in India extracted from their client states in the Gulf new agreements not to relinquish oil or mineral rights in their territories to companies other than those owned by British interests. This effect­ ively monopolized concession rights along much of the Persian Gulf coast. As World War I approached, British strategists concluded that petroleum was a strategically vital commodity crucial to the modernization of the Royal Navy, and they worked to convert the navy from one powered by coal to one fueled by oil. This necessitated a secure supply of Persian petroleum. Accordingly, in 1914, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill convinced the British government to purchase a controlling interest in APOC. The British also purchased an interest in the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), which had been created to exploit the oil wealth of Mesopotamia and emerged as a major player in Middle Eastern oil ventures by the early 1920s. World War I made Britain the undisputed master of the Persian Gulf. Its exclusive agree­ ments with the Gulf rulers remained, and the Gulf sheikhdoms rested within the geopolitical framework of the region’s larger states—Persia and the emerging nations of Iraq and Saudi Arabia—all of which had become British clients dominated politically and economically by London. In 1924, a British government spokesman proclaimed that “our position in the Persian Gulf is at the present time absolutely untouched and unassailable.”14 Britain’s dominance in the Persian Gulf did not go unchallenged for long. US oil companies soon showed an interest in cheaply extracted and easily refined Persian Gulf petroleum. In 1932, a subsidiary of the Standard Oil Company of California obtained a concession from the govern­ ment of Bahrain. Shortly thereafter, in 1934, Gulf Oil, with support from the US government, sought concessionary rights in Kuwait. By far the most important American oil concession in the Persian Gulf region was that granted by the Saudi Arabian King Abdul-Aziz to Standard Oil of California in 1933, which started to produce oil in commercial quantities in the Kingdom in 1938.15 World War II again transformed the strategic geography of the Middle East and Persian Gulf. Oil produced by British companies in Iran, Iraq, and Bahrain was critical to the Allied war effort, and British military facilities in the lower Gulf became crucial transportation and trans­ shipment points between the European and Asian theaters of the conflict. Iran and Iraq acted as a vital land bridge that connected Britain to its empire, and policy makers and strategists in London were determined to use the war to secure British oil interests and lines of communica­ tion through the Gulf region. In fact, argues Ashley Jackson,  Iran and Iraq were paramount [to British calculations in the Middle East], a factor absent in most historical accounts, with their overbearing focus on the Western desert and the defence of Egypt—which was actually an outworkings of the defence of Iran and Iraq.16 Further, analysts concluded that 25 percent of Britain’s military capabilities in the war would be compromised if British oil facilities in Abadan and Bahrain were lost.17 Britain found its interests in the Gulf challenged by enemies and allies alike during the war. In 1941, they fought a short sharp campaign to dislodge the pro-German government of Rashid 38

Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1617–2019

Ali-Gailani in Baghdad and establish a pliant regime there. Later that summer, Britain joined the Soviet Union to invade Iran and depose Reza Shah Pahlavi. Their joint occupation of Iran was intended to protect British Gulf oil and secure the “Persian corridor,” through which growing volumes of US Lend Lease aid was shipped to the Soviet Union. Perhaps the greatest threat to British paramountcy in the Gulf during the war years, though, came from Britain’s closest ally, the United States. The Roosevelt administration worked act­ ively during the war to secure US petroleum interests in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, and to supplant Britain as the Kingdom’s most important foreign patron. Prime Minister Churchill was concerned and complained to the president in early 1944 “there is an apprehension in some quarters here … that the United States has a desire to deprive us of our oil assets in the Middle East” and that “we are being hustled.” The president retorted that he was disturbed by rumors that “the British wish to horn in on Saudi Arabian oil reserves,” but he assured Churchill that “we are not making sheep’s eyes at your oil fields in Iran or Iraq.”18 The prime minister was not reassured. British officials viewed with mounting trepidation the clout of the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) in Saudi Arabia and saw the increasing American economic and political presence in the Gulf as a challenge to British interests. At the same time, Saudi King Abdul-Aziz and senior members of the Saudi court actively encouraged Anglo-American political competition in Saudi Arabia. Seeking to secure his throne and expand his influence throughout Arabia, the king did not wish to see his country dominated by a single Western power. So, the most important conflict in the Persian Gulf region during the early 1940s had not been between the Allied and Axis powers but between Britain and the United States for political dominance in Saudi Arabia, a contest in which the United States prevailed by 1945.19

Cold War, revolutionary nationalism, and imperial retreat (1945–71) The Cold War and the era of imperial retreat again transformed the Persian Gulf’s economic and strategic value to Britain. Persian Gulf petroleum literally fueled and lubricated Britain’s reconstruction after World War II. Its sale by British firms contributed greatly to Britain’s balance of payments, and it emerged as a critically important strategic commodity as the East– West Cold War unfolded. In 1946, the British military’s Chiefs of Staff Committee determined, “We are forced to the inescapable conclusion that if there were no other reasons for maintaining our position in the Middle East the problem of our oil supplies would demand that we should do so.”20 By 1960, British Petroleum drew 98 percent of its oil from the Persian Gulf, 51 percent from Kuwait alone. British consumption of Persian Gulf oil continued to grow over the next decade, and British oil investment in the Gulf benefitted the balance of payments to the tune of over £200 million per year in foreign exchange savings and overseas sales.21 Britain’s role in the Persian Gulf also bestowed certain intangible political benefits. Exhausted by its participation in World War II, policy makers in London struggled to preserve Britain’s status as a world power of the first order. India’s independence in 1947 appeared to remove an important reason for their presence in the Gulf; however, they believed Britain’s extensive and venerable interests in the Gulf and hard-won knowledge of the region’s politics and economics conferred on them an important stature in Western councils during the Cold War. The growing strategic value of the Persian Gulf could make them an indispensable ally to the United States in the region and allow Britain to “punch above its weight” diplomatically. In the early years of the Cold War, the emergence of virulently anti-British local nationalisms challenged the security of British petroleum interests in the Gulf as well as Britain’s stature as the West’s most important actor in the region. The nationalist regime of Mohammad Mosaddeq in 39

W. Taylor Fain

Tehran expropriated the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) in 1951 and touched off a twoyear crisis that ended Britain’s monopoly over Iranian oil and diminished its position in the Gulf.22 Gamal Abdel Nasser’s subsequent emergence as the revolutionary leader of Egypt and the champion of radical Arab nationalism further eroded Britain’s position in the Gulf. The radio “Voice of the Arabs,” broadcasting from Cairo, spread its anti-Western message through­ out the Gulf, and Egyptian teachers and technicians began to appear in the Emirates to espouse the tenets of “Nasserism” and pan-Arabism. During the Suez Crisis of 1956, the British Political Resident in Bahrain was compelled to request military assistance from Aden to quell civil unrest, and additional troops were dispatched to Sharjah on the Trucial Coast.23 Their responses to the challenges presented by Arab nationalism underscored sharp differ­ ences between Britain and the United States over how best to secure the Persian Gulf and Western interests in the Middle East. In London, Arab nationalism and Nasserism were con­ strued as dire threats to Britain’s investments and strategic posture in the Middle East. US policy makers, on the other hand, understood the phenomena largely within the context of their efforts to contain communism and revolution on the Cold War’s periphery. They believed Arab nationalism was a force that could be co-opted and channeled in directions consistent with Western interests and frequently counseled the skeptical British to negotiate with and conciliate local nationalists. At the same time, many American analysts worried that a continued British imperial presence in the Gulf would inflame and radicalize nationalist sentiment and open the door to Soviet influence in the Gulf. Their interpretation of the challenges posed by local nationalisms left US strategists and diplomats conflicted over how best to respond to Britain’s continued presence and role in the Gulf. While some favored placating local nationalists and encouraging an orderly British depar­ ture from the region, others valued Britain’s role in securing the Gulf militarily and ensuring the uninterrupted flow of reasonably priced oil to the West. They favored subsidizing Britain’s con­ tinued presence in the Gulf politically and even economically. These mixed messages frustrated British policy makers. After the Suez debacle, they redoubled their efforts to make their know­ ledge and experience of the Persian Gulf indispensable to their American allies and worked assiduously to move US power behind British interests in the Gulf. With the ambivalence of their American allies in mind, during the post-war years, the British continued to take steps to secure their position politically and militarily in the Persian Gulf. The Residency and Agency system remained as the instrument through which London managed its relations with the Gulf rulers, but following Indian independence in 1947, the Foreign Office assumed the responsibility from the India Office of managing Gulf relations. The exclusive agree­ ments with the local sheikhdoms persisted, and British advisers continued to sit at the elbows of the local rulers to ensure they did not take actions inconsistent with British interests in the Gulf. The British in the Gulf played a traditional imperial role in deciding which rulers and gov­ ernments in the Gulf were best suited to securing British goals there. They selectively recog­ nized these with an eye toward the:  acquisition of coercible treaty partners in line with a general policy of delegating accountability, the attainment of influence over dynastic succession in its protégés, and the pursuit of various tactical considerations—a divide and rule policy … in the early years of Britain’s hegemony, a policy to exclude imperial competitors in the Gulf, the building of bases, and the granting of oil concessions.24 Ensuring that their Gulf clients were pliable and committed to the letter of their exclusive agree­ ments with London deeply concerned British policy makers, who frequently intervened in the 40

Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1617–2019

domestic and dynastic affairs of the sheikhdoms. In Dubai (1965), Sharjah (1968), and Oman (1970), for example, the British engaged in the practice of “anchoring suitable allies in power by means of colonial coups” frequently cloaked in the language of concern for the well-being of the Gulf’s peoples and the sanctity of its legal obligations to the sheikhdoms. In the end, Britain insisted on “rulers it could depend on to ensure the future survival of the system and the containment of its foreign land local revolutionary enemies.”25 Another British tool for securing the Gulf was to tie it more closely to the resources it deployed throughout the greater Persian Gulf region. Most importantly, in the 1950s, Britain began to augment its military facilities in the Crown Colony of Aden as a base from which they could reinforce and resupply their Gulf clients in emergencies. In 1965, they worked with the United States to detach the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius and establish the British Indian Ocean Territory. From bases on the territory’s largest island, Diego Garcia, the Anglo-American allies would be able to project military power throughout the Persian Gulf region.26 But despite their best efforts to shore up Britain’s position in the Gulf and its periphery, policy makers in London appreciated by the mid-1960s that the days of their permanent military role in the Gulf and “East of Suez” were numbered. The British Treasury, in particular, came to question the cost effectiveness of Britain’s military commitment to safeguard the flow of Gulf oil and to secure British interests in Southeast Asia. Diane Kunz observes, “It is no exaggeration to describe the three years 1964–1967 as virtually one continuous [financial] crisis,” and Brit­ ain’s ability to remain a key actor “East of Suez” was continually threatened by its fragile economy.27 A Defence Review in 1965 concluded that Britain must shed key overseas obliga­ tions in order to bring its overseas military obligations into line with expenditures, and it became clear that the military facilities in Aden, which played a key role in British plans to defend the Gulf, must be relinquished. Other factors, foreign and domestic, required that Britain retreat from the Gulf and its other East of Suez obligations. In the Gulf itself, Kuwait, whose oil production had been critical to British petroleum needs, had become independent in 1961. Although Britain remained responsible for its defense against Iraqi depredations, many policy makers had come to doubt the efficacy of a military strategy to preserve the flow of Kuwaiti and Gulf oil. Further, a viru­ lent and fractious nationalist movement had arisen in Aden and was determined to expel Britain from its dependencies in southwest Arabia. In November 1967, British forces beat an ignominious retreat from the colony, and many of its military resources were hastily rede­ ployed to bases in the lower Gulf. Meanwhile, at home, vocal elements within Harold Wil­ son’s Labour government and in parliament called for an end to Britain’s permanent military role East of Suez, characterizing it as a relic of a morally discredited imperial past that put in financial jeopardy the social programs they had been elected to implement.28 A Sterling devalu­ ation crisis in November 1967 was the final straw, and in January 1968, Wilson announced Britain would withdraw its forces from East of Suez by the end of 1971, much earlier than it had anticipated. The United States in the 1960s had worked to support and subsidize Britain’s continued military role in the Gulf for pragmatic reasons. National Security Council staffer David Klein noted to President Lyndon Johnson’s National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy in June 1965,  It is useful for us to have their flag, not ours, “out front” in the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf—in areas where they have strong historical associations. For we might be very much better off to pay for part of their presence—if they really cannot afford it— than finance our own.29 41

W. Taylor Fain

Consumed by its war in Southeast Asia, the Johnson administration feared that a British with­ drawal from the region would leave a power vacuum that the United States would be expected to fill. When Foreign Secretary George Brown informed US Secretary of State Dean Rusk of his government’s intentions, Rusk barked “For God’s sake, act like Britain!” The secretary fumed that “he could not believe that free aspirins and false teeth were more important than Britain’s role in the world” and thundered that he was “profoundly dismayed” that Britain appeared to be retreating to a “Little England” posture.30 Despite the United States’ dismay at their decision, Wilson’s Labour government brought Britain’s permanent military presence in the Persian Gulf to an end as 1971 expired. Bowing to the inevitable but determined not to undertake costly new foreign policy responsibilities, the Johnson and Nixon administrations moved to find surrogates for British power in the Gulf. By the early 1970s, Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, were strug­ gling to establish Iran and Saudi Arabia as the “twin pillars” of pro-Western stability in the region.31

Britain and the Persian Gulf after the retreat from “East of Suez” (1971–2019) Although Britain brought to a close its permanent strategic presence in the Persian Gulf at the end of 1971, it continued to play a key role militarily and commercially in the region during the years that followed. When the Conservative government of Edward Heath came to power in June 1970, its initial inclination was to reverse the Labour government’s move to withdraw British military forces from the Gulf, but after reviewing the situation Heath concluded that it would be impossible either to postpone or reverse the 1968 decision. Instead, Foreign Secretary Alec Douglas-Home announced that it would be the government’s policy to “establish a stable political situation” in the region before withdrawal and continue its links and assistance to the Gulf states.32 Its most pressing task was to organize the sheikhdoms of the lower Gulf into a federation capable of cooperating economically and politically and of preserving British interests in the region. An attempt in 1968 and 1969 to bind the nine polities into a Federation of Arab Emirates failed when Bahrain and Qatar demurred, but the remaining seven sheikhdoms agreed to establish the United Arab Emirates (UAE) by the end of 1971.33 Another tool Britain employed effectively to secure its continuing interests in the Gulf was the deployment of loan service officers seconded to the militaries of the Gulf states along with military training teams and special forces units. In Oman, for example, a persistent communistinspired insurgency in the Dhofar region prompted the British government in 1970 to send elements of the Special Air Services to train local militias, or firqas, and to combat the Marxist rebels. The insurgency was defeated by late 1975, and the British contribution was crucial to the effort. The Sultan of Oman’s Forces remained filled with British officers, and Omani officers regularly received training at British air, military, and naval training institutions.34 The British personnel were not alone among their countrymen in the Gulf. At the end of the twentieth century, 172 British loan services officers remained in the region, and a decade later, 350 former British military officers and senior non-commissioned officers served in the UAE’s armed forces alone.35 Britain’s military involvement in Gulf affairs continued through the 1980s, during the Iran– Iraq War, with the deployment of the Royal Navy’s Armilla Patrol, a small force designed to “provide a powerful sign of Britain’s commitment to the freedom of navigation; to provide reassurance to British-registered and British-owned shipping; and to assist such ships in their passage through the Gulf area,” according to a British government statement.36 During the 1991 42

Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1617–2019

war with Iraq, Britain initiated Operation Granby, through which it made the fourth largest contribution to the coalition arrayed against Saddam Hussein, behind the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. Its deployment of 40,000 military personnel was “a clear political signal from London that it was still a key actor with vital interests to protect in and around the Arabian pen­ insula.”37 Throughout the 1990s, British military aircraft participated in Operation Southern Watch enforcing the no-fly zone over Iraq, and Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind told Arab journalists in 1998 that: The nature of the British role in the Gulf changed in 1971 but that does not mean that we have lost our interest in the region. We were and still are interested in the stability in the Gulf region and in defending the interests of our friends and partners there. Our interest is not in oil only. There are deeper defence and security interests, not least resistance to the threats posed by Iran and Iraq.38 Consequently, between 2003 and 2011, Britain dispatched more than 120,000 service men and women to Iraq as part of Operation TELIC, during the second conflict with Saddam Hussein. Most served in the vicinity of Basra near the northern end of the Gulf, and 179 did not come home.39 Commercially and financially, Britain continued to be a major actor in the Gulf after 1971 and emerged as the second most important purveyor of arms to the Gulf nations. Under the terms of the 1985 and 1988 al-Yamamah agreements, for example, Saudi Arabia purchased approximately £12 billion worth of advanced British military aircraft to be paid for by an oiltrading arrangement managed by British Petroleum and Shell. By the early years of the twentyfirst century, Britain supplied approximately 27 percent of the total world arms deliveries to the Middle East behind only the United States’ 39 percent.40 In addition, the six nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council in 2009 represented the second most important trading bloc for Britain behind the European Union. Kuwait was Britain’s largest investor, and Dubai was Britain’s ninth largest trading partner.41 That same year, the volume of trade between Britain and the UAE, alone, was about $9 billion. In 2013, it was about $13 billion and was expected to balloon to $25 billion by 2020. Over the decade from 2020 to 2030, Britain intended to trade or invest $2 trillion in the Persian Gulf region.42 Some argued that the extensive commercial and financial ties that Britain cultivated with the Gulf states came at a price, both economic and moral. The investment of Gulf petrodollars through Britain and through London’s financial institutions reshaped British capitalism and, in many respects, made it dependent upon Gulf money. Further, concluded the advocacy group War on Want, “It is not possible to delink the export of sniper rifles and tear gas, and the train­ ing of security forces by the UK, from the violent crackdown on pro-democracy protests across the region.”43 David Wearing, of Royal Holloway University, contended in 2018 that through its commercial and security ties to the Gulf states, “the British government has in recent years played a key enabling role in supporting both the authoritarian backlash against the ‘Arab Spring’ in the Gulf and the disastrous Saudi-led intervention in the war in Yemen.”44 In the second decade of the twenty-first century, a number of factors, external and domestic, led Britain to reassert its traditional military role in the Persian Gulf region and attempt, what many termed mistakenly a return to “East of Suez.” The military analysts Gareth Stansfield, Doug Stokes, and Saul Kelly explained the move as the product of changing US strategic pri­ orities. They concluded that “With the ‘Obama Pivot’ serving to re-focus U.S. efforts away from the Middle East and towards the Far East and Pacific Rim, the pull of the potential vacuum in the Gulf region, particularly for the UK, is strong.”45 43

W. Taylor Fain

The moves began in the fall of 2014, when the British government announced that it would establish three new permanent military facilities in the Gulf region. In December that year, Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative government revealed that Britain would estab­ lish a new naval facility, HMS Juffair, at the port of Mina Salman in Bahrain. As construction began in the following year, Defence Secretary Philip Hammond declared that the facility con­ firmed that “the presence of the Royal Navy in Bahrain is guaranteed into the future,” ensuring Britain’s sustained presence east of Suez. The base, he continued, was emblematic of Britain’s “growing partnership with Gulf partners to tackle shared strategic and regional threats,” particu­ larly, he suggested, those posed by the Islamic State and Iran.46 At the same time, the Royal Air Force augmented its presence at the Al Minhad Air Base near Dubai. The government’s National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review in 2015 spelled out more explicitly its plans to renew Britain’s military role in the Gulf. It stated: We will set out our vision of our future relationships with partners in the region in our new Gulf Strategy. In particular, we will build a permanent and more substantial UK military presence to reflect our historic relationships, the long-term nature of both challenges and opportunities and to reassure our Gulf allies. We have begun work on a new naval base in Bahrain, HMS Juffair, to support Royal Navy deployments in the region, and we will establish a new British Defence Staff in the Middle East.47 Further, it announced the creation of “a Gulf Strategy Unit, hosted by the Cabinet Office, to coordinate UK engagement with the Gulf in order to deliver the NSC’s long-term strategy and maximise benefits to the UK.”48 Britain’s efforts to re-establish its military presence in the Gulf region continued apace. In December 2016, Prime Minister Theresa May announced at a summit of the Gulf Cooperation Council members that Britain would invest more than £3 billion in defense spending through­ out the region over the next decade. The steps were evidence, she asserted, that Britain intended to “make a more permanent and more enduring commitment to the long-term security of the Gulf.”49 The following August, Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon concluded an agreement that would give the Royal Navy a permanent presence at the Omani port of Duqm on the Arabian Sea as well as the establishment of a British Joint Logistics Support Base there. The port is large enough to host the new British Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carrier. Fallon’s successor at the Ministry of Defence, Gavin Williamson, confirmed in April 2018 that: “Our long-standing and deep relationship with our Gulf partners epitomises Britain’s global outlook … Gulf security is our security and what happens in the Gulf has a direct impact on the security of the British public at home.”50 Most recently, the British government signed a Joint Defence Agreement with the Omani government and announced plans to construct a new Omani–British joint training facility in the sultanate. The arrangement, declared the Ministry of Defence, “will ensure that these facilities are available for use long into the future, allowing the UK to maintain a presence in the Region.”51 Domestic economic factors, in addition to strategic calculations, shaped Britain’s decision to re-establish a permanent military presence in the Gulf. Stansfield, Stokes, and Kelly note that “there is considerable economic benefit for the UK to be not only the leading European player in the Gulf, but also the leading Western one.”52 With its impending departure from the Euro­ pean Union, they suggest, Britain is searching for ways to secure its lucrative markets in the Gulf and seeking opportunities to assert its leadership internationally, even if this contradicts its concern for human rights in the region. They note, for example, that since the beginning of the war in Yemen in 2015, the total value of British arms sales to Saudi Arabia has grown to more 44

Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1617–2019

than £6 billion.53 Writes one observer, British policy in the Gulf “will revolve around maintain­ ing trade flows, diplomatic influence and military footholds. Beyond a few vague, perfunctory statements, the funding of extremism and human rights violations will continue to be ignored.”54 At a security summit in Bahrain in December 2016, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson exulted, “Britain is back East of Suez.” Recalling the years following Harold Wilson’s 1968 decision to end Britain’s permanent military presence in the Persian Gulf, Johnson said,  The flag came down; the troops came home, from Borneo, from the Indian Ocean, from Singapore, and yes from the Gulf and we in the UK lost our focus on this part of the world … This policy of disengagement East of Suez was a mistake … We want to reverse that policy.55 Johnson was reinforcing the commonly held, though quite mistaken, belief that Britain had ceased to become an actor in the Gulf in the years after 1971. Yet, commercially and militarily, Britain never relinquished its status as a critically important participant in the affairs of the region. For four centuries, in fact, the British had pursued a constantly changing series of inter­ ests in the Gulf with an evolving set of tools and institutions. It remains an important force in the Persian Gulf today.

Notes 1 J.E. Peterson, “Britain and the Gulf: At the Periphery of Empire,” in The Persian Gulf in History, ed. Lawrence G. Potter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 278. 2 Uzi Rabi, “Britain’s ‘Special Position’ in the Gulf: Its Origins, Dynamics, and Legacy,” Middle Eastern Studies 42, no. 3 (2006): 352. 3 Malcolm Yapp, “British Policy in the Persian Gulf,” in The Persian Gulf States: A General Survey, ed. Alvin J. Cottrell (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 73. 4 Rabi, “Britain’s ‘Special Position’ in the Gulf,” 353. 5 J.B. Kelly, Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1795–1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 1. 6 R.J. Gavin, Aden Under British Rule, 1839–1967 (London: Hurst & Co., 1975), 1–130. 7 James Onley, “Britain and the Gulf Shaikhdoms, 1820–1971: The Politics of Protection,” CIRS Occasional Paper no. 4 (Doha: Center for International and Regional Studies, 2009), 4. 8 Ibid., 3 (emphasis added). 9 George N. Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1892), 464. 10 James Onley, “The Raj Reconsidered: British India’s Informal Empire and Spheres of Influence in Asia and Africa,” Asian Affairs 40, no. 1 (2009): 45–46. 11 Lovat Fraser, Indian under Curzon & After (London: William Heinemann, 1911), 112. 12 Lord Lansdowne, “Persian Gulf Declaration,” The Times, May 6, 1903, 8. 13 G.S. Graham, The Politics of Naval Supremacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 89. 14 Yapp, “British Policy in the Persian Gulf,” 88. 15 W. Taylor Fain, American Ascendance and British Retreat in the Persian Gulf Region (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 19. 16 Ashley Jackson, Persian Gulf Command: A History of the Second World War in Iran and Iraq (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 256. 17 Rowena Abdul Razak, “When Guns are Not Enough: Britain’s Response to Nationalism in Bahrain, 1958–63,” Journal of Arabian Studies 7, no. 1 (2017): 67. 18 Bruce Robellet Kuniholm, The Origins of the Cold War in the Near East: Great Power Conflict and Diplomacy in Iran, Turkey, and Greece (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 184. See also Simon Davis, “Keeping the Americans in Line? Britain, the United States and Saudi Arabia, 1939–45: InterAllied Rivalry in the Middle East Revisited,” Diplomacy & Statecraft 8, no. 1 (1997): 96–136. 19 Fain, American Ascendance and British Retreat in the Persian Gulf, 24. 20 Ibid., 31.

45

W. Taylor Fain 21 Ibid., 237, n. 15. 22 William Roger Louis, “Britain and the Overthrow of the Mosaddeq Government,” in Mohammad Mosaddeq and the 1953 Coup in Iran, eds. Mark J. Gasiorowski and Malcolm Byrne (Syracuse, NY: Syra­ cuse University Press, 2004), 126–177; and William Roger Louis, “Musaddiq and the Dilemmas of British Imperialism,” in Musaddiq, Iranian Nationalism, and Oil, eds. James A. Bill and William Roger Louis (London: I.B. Tauris, 1988), 228–260. 23 Razak, “When Guns are Not Enough,” 70. 24 Niklas A. Haller, “Selective Recognition as an Imperial Instrument: Britain and the Trucial States, 1820–1952,” Journal of Arabian Studies 8, no. 2 (2018): 291. 25 Abdel Razzaq Takriti, “Colonial Coups and the War on Popular Sovereignty,” American Historical Review 124, no. 3 (2019): 881 and 903. 26 Fain, American Ascendance and British Retreat in the Persian Gulf Region, 61 and 158–161. 27 Diane Kunz, “British Post-War Sterling Crises,” in Adventures in Britannia: Personalities, Politics, and Culture in Britain, ed. William Roger Louis (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996), 131. 28 Shohei Sato, “Britain’s Decision to Withdraw from the Persian Gulf: A Pattern Not a Puzzle,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 44, no. 2 (2016): 328–351; and Shohei Sato, “Britain’s Decision to Withdraw from the Persian Gulf, 1964–68: A Pattern and a Puzzle,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 37, no. 1 (2009): 99–117. 29 Fain, American Ascendance and British Retreat in the Persian Gulf Region, 145. 

30 Ibid., 141–142.  

31 Roham Alvandi, Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah: The United States and Iran in the Cold War (New York:

Oxford University Press, 2014), 28–64. 32 Rob Johnson, “Out of Arabia: British Strategy and the Fate of Local Forces in Aden, South Yemen, and Oman, 1967–76,” International History Review 39, no. 1 (2018): 146 and 151. 33 Simon C. Smith, Britain’s Revival and Fall in the Gulf: Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the Trucial States, 1960–1971 (London: Routledge, 2004), 49–108. 34 Johnson, “Out of Arabia,” 151–158; Clive Jones and John Stone, “Britain and the Arabian Gulf: New Perspectives on Strategic Influence,” International Relations 13, no. 4 (1997): 3–5; and J.E. Peterson, “Britain and the ‘Oman War’: An Arabian Entanglement,” Asian Affairs 7, no. 3 (1976): 285–298. 35 Onley, “Britain and the Gulf Shaikhdoms,” 24. 36 Jones and Stone, “Britain and the Arabian Gulf,” 6; and Cable, “Outside Navies in the Gulf,” 233–234. 37 Jones and Stone, “Britain and the Arabian Gulf,” 9. 38 Ibid., 17. 39  BBC News, “UK’s Operation Telic Mission in Iraq Ends,” May 22, 2011, www.bbc.com/news/ uk-13488078. 40 Jones and Stone, “Britain and the Arabian Gulf,” 11–17. 41 Onley, “Britain and the Gulf Shaikhdoms,” 25. 42 Javad Heirannia, “British Permanent Military Base in Oman: Britain’s Return to the Persian Gulf,” American Herald Tribune, November 26, 2018, https://ahtribune.com/politics/2654-british-military­ base-in-oman.html. 43 War on Want, “Arming Repression: The New British Imperialism in the Persian Gulf,” October 2016, 12, https://waronwant.org/sites/default/files/WoW_ArmingRepression_Oct2016.pdf. 44 David Wearing, AngloArabia: Why Gulf Wealth Matters to Britain (London: Polity, 2018), 3. 45 Gareth Stansfield, Doug Stokes, and Saul Kelly, “UK Strategy in the Gulf and Middle East after Amer­ ican Retrenchment,” Insight Turkey 20, no. 4 (2018): 234. 46 Chris Johnston, “Britain to Build First Permanent Middle East Military Base in Four Decades,” The Guardian, December 6, 2014, www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/dec/06/britain-first-middle­ eastern-military-base-bahrain. 47 HM Government, National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review 2015: A Secure and Prosperous United Kingdom, November 2015, 55, https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/ uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/478936/52309_Cm_9161_NSS_SD_Review_PRINT _only.pdf. 48 Ibid., 84. 49 Paul Iddon, “Britain’s New Persian Gulf Venture,” The National Interest, December 21, 2016, https:// nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/britains-new-persian-gulf-venture-18808. 50 UK Ministry of Defence, “Security in the Gulf is Vital to Keeping Britain Safe,” April 12, 2018, www. gov.uk/government/news/security-in-the-gulf-is-vital-to-keeping-britain-safe.

46

Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1617–2019 51 UK Ministry of Defence, “UK and Oman Sign Historic Joint Defence Agreement,” February 21, 2019, www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-and-oman-sign-historic-joint-defence-agreement. 52 Stansfield, Stokes, and Kelly, “UK Strategy in the Gulf and Middle East After American Retrenchment,” 240. 53 Ibid., 243. 54 Antoine Vagneur-Jones, “Global Britain in the Gulf: Brexit and Relations with the GCC,” Fondation pour la Rechereche Stratégique, July 29, 2017, www.frstrategie.org/en/publications/notes/global­ britain-gulf-brexit-relations-gcc-2017. 55 Foreign and Commonwealth Office, “Foreign Secretary Speech: ‘Britain is Back East of Suez,’ ” December 9, 2016, www.gov.uk/government/speeches/foreign-secretary-speech-britain-is-back-east­ of-suez.

47

6 

The STaTeS of The  

PerSian Gulf  

from protectorates to independent countries  

Lucy M. Abbott Following the announcement of the National Vision transformation plans in the Arab states of the Gulf in the early 2000s, it would be easy to assume that colonialism and its legacies are no longer relevant to contemporary regional and sub-regional politics. Affected in some shape or form by protectorate arrangements at different junctures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the modern states of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates have successfully emerged into wealthy independent states of growing power at both the regional and international levels. Though the post-independence era has signified the formal retreat of the structures of colonial influence, the geostrategic relevance of the Arabian Peninsula and its territories remains. It is not surprising then, that independence has brought enduring questions of sovereignty, security, and national interest into sharp focus for these states. This chapter has three main aims. The first aim is to provide a broad historical survey of this period of state formation in the Gulf beginning roughly around the General Treaty of 1820. This situates the sheikhdoms of the Arabian Peninsula against an historical backdrop of competitive rivalry between several imperial powers, most notably the activities of Britain, but also the activities of the Ottomans, France, and Germany. The dwindling influence of the Ottomans provided strategic and commercial opportunities for Britain and the Gulf sheikhdoms, who encountered each other as maritime actors in the Persian Gulf. The period saw the emergence of several protectorates, underpinned by a series of treaties with Britain and administered eventually as a group under a colonial subdivision of British India. Though never a protectorate, the eventual establishment of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932 was also made possible following a series of treaties with the British immediately after World War I. The second aim is to document and describe the variegated entries of the Arab states of the Gulf into the international system as independent states in the twentieth century.1 This was following either a formal individualized exit from British protectorate arrangements, the expiration of the British Residency of the Persian Gulf in 1971, or through recognition of territorial sovereignty. Saudi Arabia and Oman stand out here. Although both have engaged the protection of Britain in various ways in the twentieth century, neither of these states were officially British protectorates. The variation evident in these experiences highlight Britain’s consistently contingent approach to the conduct of affairs in its “informal empire.” Early Saudi frictions with Ottoman suzerainty in the Arabian Peninsula set the scene for territorial claims that remain relevant in the later history of the Gulf in the twentieth century. The discovery of oil in the 1930s 48

The states of the Persian Gulf

provided a new economic base for these states, while at the same bringing even greater commercial and strategic pressures to the Persian Gulf. The third and final aim of the chapter is to trace the emergence of the independent states in the context of enduring domestic and international issues that these states have had to confront following the withdrawal of Britain from the Gulf in 1971. The most pressing of these has been security. Independence has not necessarily meant complete expiration of Britain’s defense obligations to the former protectorates of the protection system. The experiences of Oman and Kuwait, for example, show that Britain was still responsive to appeals for assistance, long after formal protectorate arrangements and defense obligations had ceased. Britain’s reduced presence provided an opportunity for the United States to further develop its influence in the region through an enhanced military presence. One approach to dealing with these enduring issues has been through the deployment of strategies that have actively asserted the new independence of these states. At the international level, for example, sustained activity in foreign policy has seen the formation of the Gulf Cooperation Council and the development of independent foreign policy initiatives. At the domestic level too, the Gulf states have made considerable internal investments strengthening economic development, founding and expanding new urban centers, and defining national identity.

The Arabian Peninsula amid imperial frontiers Historical scholarship of the Arabian Peninsula at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries has covered the British activities in the Gulf at great length. Extensive amounts and the availability of Colonial Office records have generated an historical account which prioritizes British activities around the Persian Gulf, while other dynamics including competitors and local populations have not received as much attention. The Gulf sheikhdoms and claimed territories found themselves wedged between the frontiers of several competing imperial and expansionist powers. In addition to Britain, these included, at various junctures, the Persian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman, Germany, France, and Russia. The Ottomans, who held control over Hasa, Kuwait, and Qatar from 1870–71 to 1914, have been ascribed a marginal historical role.2 Frederick Anscombe characterized Ottoman ambitions as limited to “securing its southern borders against the further spread of European influence.”3 Although this may have seemed modest compared to the extent of Britain’s strategic domination of the region, the Ottomans inclusion of several sheikhdoms under vilayet administration had a significant impact on boundary setting in eastern Arabia. The bestowal of authority onto individual sheikhs in Kuwait and Qatar, for example, strengthened their political authority and ability to dominate territory a few years later.4 British interests in the Arabian Peninsula developed from its strategically advantageous position for maintaining British India, the “Jewel in the Crown” of the British Empire.5 The deep ports along its coast line, for example, had already enabled the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman’s maritime empire to flourish following the expulsion of the Portuguese in 1650.6 Controlling access to this important strategic region allowed the British to develop a commercial monopoly through limiting the access of other competitors to the region. The case of the Berlin–Baghdad railway illustrates the contours of this competition for influence. Between 1898 and 1899, the Ottomans awarded Germany approval to build a railway from Berlin to Baghdad, a line that would have connected trade goods between Germany and the furthest reaches of the German colonies, via a port in the Persian Gulf. This stood to assist the advance of Germany into the Gulf and so to curb this, the British took the lead for the southern section from Baghdad to Basra.7 49

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The British had been in the region much earlier on account of their interest in controlling the Pirate Coast defined by John Kelly as “the Shaikhdoms on the southern shore of the Gulf from Ras al-Khaimah southward” and also as the Trucial States.8 The ships of the East India Company transiting through the Gulf were sometimes laden with vast quantities of high-value commercial goods and became the target of pirates. Raids on British ships had such a profound effect on commerce that a Gulf-wide maritime campaign was needed. The Persian Gulf campaign of 1809 saw the East India Company and the Royal Navy combine to face the Qawasim (sing. Qasimi), who had been accused of piracy and looting British ships in the strait of Hormuz.9 Controlling piracy came to be the basis of the General Treaty of 1820 signed by the rulers of Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, Ajman, Ras al Khaimah, Umm al-Quwain, Bahrain, and the British. This was the first of several treaties used in the Gulf region over the coming sixty years as the British sought to shore up their control through offering protection to the various principalities of the Arabian Peninsula. Following agreements in 1856, 1861, 1880, and 1892, the Exclusive Agreement of 1892 formalized the conditions of commercial monopoly in the Gulf, where rulers agreed not to enter into “any agreement or correspondence with any Power other than the British Government.”10 The presence of multiple imperialist competitors in the region also provided political opportunities to local notables for territorial recognition, acquisition, and expansion.11 The events leading to the establishment of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, for example, illustrate these dynamics. Abdul-Aziz bin Abdul Rahman al-Saud (“Ibn Saud”) leveraged the Ottomans and the British against each other in order to bring together the territories that would become the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932.12 Another example of this can be seen in the experience of the sheikhdom of Kuwait, whose borders and status became recognized through the 1913 Anglo-Ottoman Convention. Kuwait had been under Ottoman jurisdiction since 1871 and was included as part of the vilayet of Basra in 1875. The convention positioned Kuwait as an autonomous kaza of the Ottoman Empire, recognizing Sheikh Mubarak al-Sabah in the dual role of ruler of Kuwait and Ottoman district governor (kaymakam).13

Gulf protectorates in Britain’s informal empire The purpose of British protectorates in the region was “the establishment of peace among the local shayks, the elimination of piracy, and then toward a consolidation of the British position.”14 In return for signing treaties with the British, rulers in the Gulf could initially expect a system of protection which acknowledged their territorial claims and recognized their authority over their internal affairs. As the strategic value of the Gulf was related to the maintenance of supply lines to British India, these territories were treated as “protectorates” under the colonial of British India and separate from other colonial territories in the Middle East.15 This is an important distinction which separates the Gulf territories from other Middle East countries which were directly colonized. Aden, for example, was a treated as a colony and subjected to direct rule, whereas Gulf protectorates had relative autonomy in their domestic affairs and commercial support for their longer-term economic development. James Onley argues that Britain took on a role as guardian of the Persian Gulf and did not seek to impose this coercively, but rather through a system of “informal empire” which correlated with “local expectations of a protector’s duties and rights” and resulted in the implementation of a Pax Britannica.16 To that end, the protectorates in the Gulf were not considered a formal part of the British Empire. Yet, the legal status of protectorate created an ambiguous relationship to international law because it  effectively suspended or ceded foreign relations and thus sovereign rights to Britain. As the  various legal positions of the protectorates were “not fully clarified,”17 their capacity for 50

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autonomous action in the international domain was curtailed. Protection through treaty was soon considered by other imperial powers to be an effective instrument for dominating territories elsewhere in the Middle East. France also used the protectorate status for French Tunisia (established through the Treaty of Bardo in 1881) and French Morocco (established through the Treaty of Fez in 1912). The Persian Gulf Residency (1763–1971) was key to the infrastructure of the Pax Britannica. The political authority of the British Raj was enshrined in the Persian Gulf Residency, an official colonial subdivision. Through the General Treaty of 1820, it was authorized to conduct the duties of maritime policing in the Gulf and the resolution of disputes between the sheikhdoms of the Trucial States, Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Dubai, Ras al Khaimah, Sharjah, and Umm alQuwain, a system which became permanent with the 1853 Treaty of Maritime Peace. The signing of Exclusive Agreements with Bahrain and Sharjah in 1892 put foreign relations firmly in British hands and ended the prevailing policy of non-involvement in domestic affairs.18 In contrast to the Trucial States, Kuwait was not a signatory of the General Treaty, signing instead a maritime treaty with the British in 1841 and a protectorate agreement in 1899.19 Like Kuwait, Qatar was subject to Ottoman jurisdiction from 1871 until Muhammad al Thani, despite having signed a treaty with Britain in 1868, which recognized its separate status. The Anglo-Ottoman Convention of 1913 saw the Ottomans renounce their claim to Qatar and it became a British protectorate in 1916, thus bringing it under the same system of administration as the Trucial States. Finally, the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman, was not a signatory to the General Treaty of 1820 but signed a treaty of “peace, friendship and navigation” in 1891, 1939, and 1951.20 In addition to the strategic advantages of conducting foreign relations on behalf of the protectorates, Britain’s informal empire also managed to gain a preferential access to natural resource concessions (oil, pearls, coal) within their territories.21 The Exclusive Agreements ensured that Britain would be consulted prior to rulers giving away territory or options to other interested parties. In Kuwait, Britain was granted monopoly on oil exploration and exploitation in 1913. In Bahrain, for example, this was granted in 1914, in Qatar somewhat later in 1932. Part of this deal involved the British offering military protection against Ibn Saud in exchange for exclusive rights to the oil concession. In 1923, the Sultan of Muscat and Oman agreed to not develop oil resources without the approval of the Political Agent.

Independence and statehood in the Gulf The inter-war years ushered in a new era of autonomy in the Gulf. The 1927 Treaty of Jeddah formalized British recognition of Ibn Saud’s sovereignty over Hejaz and Nejd. Alongside the other Saud-controlled areas of Al Hasa and Qatif, these territories would become part of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932. In 1967, shortly after Kuwaiti independence from Britain in 1961, Britain announced its permanent withdrawal from the Gulf on account of economic necessity.22 Writing soon after British withdrawal, Robert Owen notes that, although not publicly acknowledged, the British also had concerns about rising nationalist and anti-colonial sentiment movements in the Gulf.23 In her study of Bahraini nationalism in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Rowena Abdul Razak argues that the British had increased their presence in Bahrain over a ten-year period to deal with the encroaching influence of Arab nationalism, which had galvanized a Bahraini nationalist struggle for an independent identity. Strikes followed the Bahrain Petroleum Company’s (BAPCO) announcement of a redundancy program in 1965.24 In addition to Arab nationalism, Soviet influence was also a factor in British policy in the Gulf at this time. The Dhofari liberation movement, for example, imported a Marxist-Leninist ideology aimed at removing all imperial activity, to Dhofar province, Oman from a guerrilla 51

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movement in British-ruled South Yemen in 1965.25 Christopher Davidson argues that Dubai also saw its share of anti-colonial action associated with Arab nationalism.26 The Persian Gulf Residency was terminated on December 16, 1971 and saw the exit of serious British military presence in the Persian Gulf. The withdrawal brought the issue of independence into sharp focus for those territories who had not yet emerged into the international system as distinctive sovereign states. This sped up the process of independence for the last few remaining protectorates who discussed the possibility of forming a confederated union of emirates including Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Dubai, Fujairah, Sharjah, Umm al-Quwain, Bahrain, and Qatar. Bahrain and Qatar eventually dropped out of the proposed union but the remaining emirates agreed to join together as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 1971. Ras al Khaimah joined the UAE in 1972.27 As Simon Smith notes, the emergence of the UAE was one success story among a series of British failures in the Gulf.28 The British withdrawal did not necessarily mean that defense expectations that had traditionally associated with protectorate status would not reappear following independence. For example, the ruler of newly independent Kuwait, Sheikh Abdullah III al-Salim Al-Sabah called on the British for protection following a territorial claim to Kuwait issued by Abdul Karim Qasim of Iraq in June 1961. Operation Vantage saw the British deploy extensive military personnel in Kuwait to support the Kuwaiti forces and deter an Iraqi attack. The Arab League took over the defense arrangements in 1963. When Iraq finally did invade Kuwait in 1990, military support came from an international United Nations coalition lead by the United States. Similarly, Oman, never a protectorate and thus did not have the same claim to defense support as Kuwait, requested British support during internal turmoil due to the Dhofar rebellion (1963–76). With British support, Qaboos Bin Said took power from Sultan Said Bin Taimur during a coup d’état in 1970.29

Conclusion The modern Gulf states’ emergence into the international system brought with it new obligations to address autonomously peace and maritime security, broader foreign policy, and economic development. Their record in these domains since independence has developed at a rapid pace, confronting new challenges using revenues generated by resource abundance to build state institutions and infrastructures. The considerable exposure of the Gulf states to global oil markets, while having brought commercial opportunities has also brought economic risk and uncertainty. Pressures on oil prices in particular have influenced Gulf states to create bold and ambitious economic plans to address the possibility of a post-oil future. Having spent much of the twentieth century defining themselves externally as new states, the Gulf states have now turned back to address domestic affairs, developing the citizenry and workforce in line with the new National Vision plans. Although the structures of Britain’s “informal empire” and its protectorates have long fallen away, and the days of military protection drawn to a close, the Gulf states’ imperial experiences continue to be relevant to new practices in contemporary state-building. The current “heritage boom” in the Gulf, for example, offers an effective way to articulate and define distinctive national identities while drawing on social commonalities and aspects of a shared historical experience. As Gerd Nonneman and Marc Valeri note in a special issue of the Journal of Arabian Studies on the heritage boom, these heritage initiatives are not limited to museums but can also be found in “schooling, locally-based research, cultural programming, government infrastructure and urbanization projects, and political strategies.”30 Of particular interest is how the Gulf states themselves have told the story of colonialism and the status of protectorate in the construction of 52

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their own national narratives. As noted earlier in this chapter, the availability of British colonial records has to date dominated the historical account of this important formative period for the nascent Gulf states. As Kamrava notes, local populations were not consulted about protectorate arrangements and their impact on those beyond the ruling families.31 State investment in culture and heritage programs is one way in which these states have begun to address and articulate their own experiences of this period. Although still at an early stage, this goes some way to addressing the absence of a diversity of perspectives in the historiography of the Gulf.

Notes 1 This study of the interplay between the infrastructure of the protectorate system and the emergence of the modern Gulf states limits its focus to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Oman, Kuwait, and Qatar. Iraq, though a state of the Persian Gulf, is omitted from this list because it was administered by the British through a League of Nations mandate and not the protectorate system of the British Empire. 2 For more details on Ottoman activity in eastern Arabia, see Jon Mandaville, “The Ottoman Province of al-Hasa in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 90 (1970): 486–513; Frederick Anscombe, “Continuities in Ottoman Centre-Periphery Relations, 1787–1915,” in The Frontiers of the Ottoman World, ed. Andrew Peacock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 235–252; Frederick Anscombe, The Ottoman Gulf: The Creation of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar 1870–1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); and on the spice trade, see Giancarlo Casale, “The Ottoman Administration of the Spice Trade in the Sixteenth-Century Red Sea and Persian Gulf,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 49, no. 2 (2006): 170–198. 3 Frederick Anscombe, “The Ottoman Role in the Gulf,” in The Persian Gulf in History, ed. Laurence G. Potter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 260. 4 Ibid., 262. 5 This has been noted by a series of writers on colonialism and diplomatic historians including John Marlowe, The Persian Gulf in the Twentieth Century (New York, Praeger, 1962); George E. Kirk, A Short History of the Middle East from the Rise of Islam to Modern Times (London: Methuen, 1964); John B. Kelly, Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1795–1880 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968); Glen Balfour-Paul, The End of Empire in the Middle East: Britain’s Relinquishment of Power in Her Last Three Arab Dependencies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); James Onley, The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj: Merchants, Rulers, and the British in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Briton Cooper Busch, Britain and the Persian Gulf: 1894–1914 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967); and Briton Cooper Busch, Britain and the Persian Gulf: 1795–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). 6 For an overview of Portuguese activity in the Gulf from 1509–1750, see João Teles e Cunha, “The Portuguese Presence in the Persian Gulf,” in The Persian Gulf in History, ed. Laurence G. Potter (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 207–234. 7 Kirk, A Short History of the Middle East, 74–95; and Herbert J. Liebesny, “The International Relations of Arabia: The Dependent Areas,” Middle East Journal 1, no. 2 (1947): 149. 8 Kelly, Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1795–1880. 9 It is important to note that the British characterization of piracy in the region is contested in Sheikh Sultan bin Muhammed Al-Qasimi, The Myth of Arab Piracy in the Gulf (London: Croom Helm, 1986); also in Khaldoun Al-Naqeeb, Society and State in the Gulf and Arab Peninsula: A Different Perspective (New York: Routledge, 1990). They portray the Qawasim’s activities as a lawful form of anti-imperialist resistance. 10 Frauke Heard-Bey, From Trucial States to United Arab Emirates: A Society in Transition (London: Longman, 1982), 293. 11 On the role of tribes in local political arrangements and in relation to the state, see Philip Khoury and Joseph Kostiner, eds., Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris, 1992). 12 Gerd Nonneman, “Saudi-European Relations, 1902–2001: A Pragmatic Quest for Relative Autonomy,” International Affairs 77, no. 3 (2001): 642; for a detailed study of Saudi Arabia in the years surrounding the kingdom’s establishment, see also Joseph Kostiner, The Making of Saudi Arabia, 1916–1936: From Chieftaincy to Monarchical State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).

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Lucy M. Abbott 13 For further details on the politics of Kuwait between the Ottoman and the British at this time, see Feroz Ahmad, “A Note on the International Status of Kuwait before November 1914,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 24, no. 1 (1992): 181–185. 14 Herbert J. Liebesny, “Administration and Legal Development in Arabia: The Persian Gulf Principalities,” The Middle East Journal 10, no. 1 (1956): 33. 15 They were renamed as British protectorates following the independence of India in 1947. 16 James Onley, “Britain’s Informal Empire in the Gulf, 1820–1971,” Journal of Social Affairs 22, no. 87 (2005): 29–45; and James Onley, “Britain and the Gulf Shaikhdoms, 1820–1971: The Politics of Protection,” CIRS Occasional Paper no. 4 (Doha, Qatar: Center for International and Regional Studies, 2009), 1. 17 Liebesny, “The International Relations of Arabia,” 168; and Onley, “Britain and the Gulf Shaikhdoms, 1820–1971.” 18 Herbert J. Liebesny, “British Jurisdiction in the States of the Persian Gulf,” Middle East Journal 3 (1949): 330; on Bahrain, see Talal Farah, “Protection and Politics in Bahrain, 1869–1915” (PhD diss., University of London, 1979); and Jane Kinninmont, “Bahrain,” in Power and Politics in the Persian Gulf Monarchies, ed. Christopher Davidson (London: C. Hurst & Co., 2011), 31–62. 19 On Kuwait, see Farah Al-Nakib, Kuwait Transformed: A History of Oil and Urban Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016); and Jill Crystal, Oil and Politics in the Gulf: Rulers and Merchants in Kuwait and Qatar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 20 On Oman, see Marc Valeri, Oman: Politics and Society in the Qaboos State (London: C. Hurst & Co, 2017); Rosemarie Said Zahlan, The Making of the Modern Gulf States: Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Oman (London: Garnet Publishing, 1998); and John E. Peterson, Oman in the Twentieth Century: Political Foundations of an Emerging State (London: Croom Helm, 1978). 21 Liebesny, “International Relations of Arabia,” 161–164. 22 Roger Owen, “The British Withdrawal from the Persian Gulf,” The World Today 28, no. 2 (1972): 76. 23 Ibid. 24 Rowena Abdul Razak, “When Guns Are Not Enough: Britain’s Response to Nationalism in Bahrain, 1958–63,” Journal of Arabian Studies 7 no. 1 (2017): 77. 25 Fred Halliday, “The Gulf Between Two Revolutions: 1958–1979,” MERIP Report 85 (1980): 8; for further details on British activities toward the end of the Dhofar, see James Worrall, “Britain’s Last Bastion in Arabia: The End of the Dhofar War, the Labour Government and the Withdrawal from RAF Salalah and Masirah, 1974–1977,” in Challenging Retrenchment: The United States, Great Britain and the Middle East, 1950–1980, ed. Tore Petersen (Trondheim: Tapir Academic Press, 2010), 115–140. 26 Christopher Davidson, “Arab Nationalism and British Opposition in Dubai 1920–66,” Middle Eastern Studies 43, no. 6 (2007): 885–889. 27 See Zahlan, The Making of the Modern Gulf States; Rosemarie Said Zahlan, The Creation of Qatar (London: Croom Helm, 1979); and John E. Peterson, ed., The Emergence of the Gulf States: Studies in Modern History (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016). 28 Simon Smith, “Failure and Success in State Formation: British Policy Towards the Federation of South Arabia and the United Arab Emirates,” Middle Eastern Studies 53, no. 2 (2017): 92; also Simon Smith, Britain and the Arab Gulf after Empire: Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates 1971–1981 (Oxford: Routledge, 2019); on the United Arab Emirates, see Christopher Davidson, “The United Arab Emirates,” in Power and Politics in the Persian Gulf Monarchies, ed. Christopher Davidson (London: C. Hurst & Co., 2011), 7–30; and Kristian Ulrichsen, The United Arab Emirates: Power, Politics and Policy-Making (London: Routledge, 2016). 29 Valeri, Oman: Politics and Society in the Qaboos State, 58–63. 30 Gerd Nonneman and Marc Valeri, “The ‘Heritage’ Boom in the Gulf: Critical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives,” Journal of Arabian Studies 7 (2017): 155. 31 Mehran Kamrava, The Modern Middle East: A Political History Since the First World War (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2013), 67.

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Part II  

Society and culture 

7 

Modernity and the arab  

Gulf StateS  

The politics of heritage, memory, and forgetting 

Farah Al-Nakib Introduction: getting from “then” to “now” In his excellent book Dubai: The City as Corporation, Ahmed Kanna correctly argues that: “Today it still seems acceptable to represent the Arab Gulf, in ways no longer so acceptable in the case of other postcolonies, ahistorically and apolitically.” As he goes on to say,  it still seems natural and obvious to write about the region as traditional, a unique part of the Middle East, as supposedly governed by popular dynasties whose legitimacy rests on the pillars of cultural authenticity, tribal or Arabian desert democracy, and a sophisticated if intuitive grasp of modern capitalism.1 He adds a new twist to this prevalent orientalist gaze that views non-Western societies as static, timeless, and, in the case of the Gulf, tribal—a twist he calls “orientalism in reverse.”2 In recent years, parts of the Gulf (like Dubai) have been described as “forward-looking, dynamic, and hypermodern,” a model for an Arab region mired by war, political unrest, economic stagnation, and social conservatism.3 These twin orientalist tropes have combined to produce the dominant narrative prevalent in the official (ruling) discourse within the Gulf and echoed in both mainstream media coverage of, and much scholarship on, the region: that the Arab Gulf states are not simply caught between but are actively carving out a space for themselves between “tradition” and “modernity.” As John Fox, Nada Mourtada-Sabbah, and Mohammed al-Mutawa put it in the introduction to their 2006 volume Globalization and the Gulf, the “synthesis of traditional and ultramodern” in Gulf architecture that combines Arabian symbols with contemporary design “is emblematic of Gulf society itself as a marriage of the latest in technological innovation with a timeless social structure.”4 Miriam Cooke labels this state of being and branding in the city-states of the eastern shores of the Arabian Peninsula “tribal modern.” She uses the concept of the barzakh—a space of “undiluted convergence, the simultaneous processes of mixing and separation”5 between the physical and metaphysical worlds—to argue that native citizens of the region “are both modern and tribal.”6 Kanna also identifies two contrasting views prevalent among contemporary Emirati citizens: those who express a nostalgic lament for a bygone era based on traditional values, and those who identify with and embrace the cosmopolitanism and modernization of contemporary Dubai (the latter of whom he calls “flexible citizens”). However, 57

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he more critically, and convincingly, presents these dual discourses as mutually constitutive outcomes of a single state strategy that simultaneously presents the rulers as the guardians of traditional cultural values and as visionary modernizers. The “traditional” in this discourse is sometimes synonymous with “tribal” or “nomadic” but most often is grounded in a loosely defined period before the launch of oil industries in the region in the 1940s and 1950s. The “modern” usually refers quite simply to the current era. As so much recent analysis and scholarship on the region has dealt with Dubai (and, in its wake, the rest of the United Arab Emirates and Qatar), in the Gulf context, this present “ultramodern” period began in the 1990s with the coming of “globalization” and an era of “uneasy cosmopolitanism” that has supposedly shaken the traditional “kinship ties” and “value systems” of the region with the onslaught of so much “foreign matter”:7 be it migrant workers, tourists, satellite television, global capital, or some vague notion of “Western culture.” Not surprisingly, much of this “tradition” versus “modernity” discourse is also framed as a binary between the “local” and the “global/Western.” As suggested above by the comparison between Gulf architecture and Gulf society, citizens are seen as embodying this dichotomy between the traditional/local and the modern/global— sometimes presented as tension, at other times as fusion. As Fox, Mourtada-Sabbah, and alMutawa claim: “While the Gulf societies are fairly receptive to the material benefits of globalization, on the other hand they deliberately cushion themselves from the negative aspects of market penetration into social life and ideology.”8 Reflecting a different take on this issue, Karen Exell argues that rather than seeing globalization as a positive process that results in cultural hybridity, “conservative elements” in the Gulf are concerned with the “loss of local, Islamic values as their countries become enmeshed in global economic systems, and [with] a younger generation who have no memory of the pre-oil lifestyles and who inhabit a wealthy, elite, anglophile, cosmopolitan world.” She quotes an Emirati folklorist, who calls this Westernization a “cultural attack.”9 While citizens and residents of the Gulf (and their ruling elites) hold diverse views on identity and culture, the rhetoric of local voices championing the preservation of traditional “values” and the rejection of alien ones is often taken at face value with little critical analysis of its content or context, and is often generalized to represent the feelings and experiences of Gulf societies as a whole and across the board. The main evidence that is most commonly presented to frame, support, and project this “tradition” versus “ultramodernity” paradigm comes from the built environment: architecture that fuses traditional symbols with state-of-the-art technology and design principles as mentioned above, as well as the proliferation of pre-oil heritage projects: refurbished courtyard houses, reconstructed heritage villages, traditional crafts festivals, and so on. Nothing constructs an image of a society that is at once becoming hypermodern and global while also longing for cultural anchoring and context than the photogenic sight of a Gulf city’s skyline of spectacular skyscrapers serving as the backdrop to some “traditional” scene: a courtyard house, an “Arabesque” archway, a mosque, or camels (scenes that adorn many scholarly book covers). Indeed, the significant growth of a heritage industry across the Arab Gulf over the past two decades is often depicted as serving as the antidote to globalization and the region’s “new” cosmopolitanism, evidence that citizens are seeking to “emblazon a sense of local traditionalism within a sea of change.”10 The quest to protect and preserve a traditional culture and identity through sites and symbols of national heritage grounded in the pre-oil era is consistently regarded (though this is a somewhat simplistic view) as a reaction to globalization and the massive transformation of these cities that began in the 1990s. The exaggerated contrast between the composed antiquated tableaus of the pre-oil past and the contemporary Gulf city’s hypermodern skyline projects a smooth, linear, teleological 58

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narrative of progress, a jump from then to now that serves to emphasize the magnitude and magnificence of the present. But this narrative leaves something crucial out: at least three or four decades of what happened in between the pre-oil past and the “globalized” present. In my work on Kuwait, I refer to this period as the country’s “modern era.”11 “Modernity” here means something very specific, more than just a stand-in for the current era. The modernity to which I refer is historically situated in the mid-twentieth century (roughly from the end of World War II to the early 1980s) and encompasses a range of processes, experiences, and conditions that were distinct to that time period not only in the region but also globally. This was a period of material modernization closely linked to aesthetic, philosophical, and architectural modernism, what Marshall Berman refers to as a “dynamic and dialectical modernism” that entailed an “intimate unity of the modern self and the modern environment.”12 It was a period quite distinct from what came before, and what came after (i.e., the postmodern present). In the Gulf, it was the period when “oil’s transformative powers” not only altered the physical landscape but also engendered “a new set of practices at the micro level of the urban experience.” As Nelida Fuccaro argues, the process of oil modernization in the Gulf was much more complex and fragmented than suggested by teleological narratives that have been “instrumental in popularizing particular historical interpretations of oil development as an unstoppable march toward progress, civilization, and happiness, with the state in the driving seat.”13 Pascal Menoret similarly argues that, “Contrary to the narrative of development promoted by the Saudi state, this transformation was not a peaceful and linear evolution.”14 I too have argued in my work on Kuwait that the “linear rags-to-riches narrative (constantly reiterated by the Kuwaiti state) conceals the tensions, paradoxes, and problems that characterized Kuwait’s oil-driven modernization in the shift from scarcity to affluence.”15 Yet the decades that occurred between the pre-oil past and the hypermodern present—the Gulf’s experience of mid-century modernity—have been erased into obscurity in official, popular, and scholarly discourses of the region’s political, social, cultural, and urban development. In the early 1980s, the architect and critic Stephen Gardiner wrote the following about Kuwait, which he had just visited: There was no breathing space between ancient and modern, rags and riches; from a tiny place in the sand on the edge of the Gulf … Kuwait hurtled like a missile into the high technology of the mid-twentieth century. And over the next thirty years, the new city of Kuwait—optimistic, imaginative, confident and utterly modern—was conceived, planned, built, replanned and rebuilt. The unique creation of oil, the story of this city is astonishing.16 As I argue elsewhere in my work, Gardiner may have been prematurely optimistic about Kuwait’s seamless and meteoric “leap” into the future, but what he nonetheless captures here is the spirit of a quintessentially “modern” ethos. As M. Christine Boyer puts it: “being ‘modern’ in the early part of the twentienth [sic] century meant, among other things, being self-consciously new, blowing up the continuum of tradition, and breaking with the past.”17 For the Gulf, this was the experience of coming to terms with changes unleashed by unprecedented wealth derived from oil. The elevated role of ruling families in state-building and the management of their societies, the early transformation of townscapes through master planning and the construction of infrastructure, mass immigration and the promulgation of national citizenship laws, suburbanization: these were all processes unfolding across the Gulf that shaped the “shock of the new” that Richard Dennis describes as being one of the defining and universal features of modernity.18 This modernity in the Gulf certainly entailed absorbing new cultural influences from 59

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abroad (namely, the Arab and Western worlds), but being exposed to and influenced by other cultures was nothing new to a region that for centuries before the coming of oil was deeply integrated into the economic and cultural world of the Indian Ocean. Nor was it an imposed modernity, even though, as will be discussed below, British and American oil companies certainly positioned themselves as agents of new lifestyles that promoted a particular “brand of modernity.”19 As this chapter argues, “being modern” in the early decades of oil was embraced with much pragmatism and enthusiasm across the Arab Gulf—and, for the most part, in true modernist style, with little sentimentality or nostalgia for what was being left behind. Sentimentality and nostalgia—which eventually found their physical expression in national heritage— came later. I will elaborate further below on what it meant to “be modern” and on what modernity and modernism looked like in the Gulf in the early oil decades. The point to be made first here is that this modernity has largely been forgotten and erased from collective memory in the Arab Gulf. The landscape that it produced (and that replaced the pre-oil townscapes) is consistently demolished to make way for the skylines with which the world has become so familiar, while the era is ignored in national narratives of heritage that anchor the region’s “history” and “tradition” in the pre-oil era (thereby invalidating the modern era as a legitimate part of the nation’s, and the region’s, past). This chapter attempts to explain this erasure and forgetting by highlighting certain aspects of that era that complicate or taint the image of a smooth transition from “then” to “now” evoked by those juxtaposed landscapes mentioned earlier. When a renovated pre-oil mudbrick courtyard house or a reconstructed “traditional” suq foregrounds a hypermodern skyscraper made of glass and steel designed by an international starchitect, the shift from one life world to the other becomes more rapid, more heroic, more consensual. False starts and mistakes, conflicts and oppositions—all of which occurred in those “in-between” decades—are erased. Furthermore, it must be pointed out that the search for pre-oil authenticity that is so often attributed to the Arab Gulf states’ seemingly unique experiences of globalization is not at all exclusive to the Gulf. It is part of our global urban postmodern condition. If the city of modernity explicitly broke with the past then, to return to Boyer, the contemporary arts of city building, by returning to traditions established in the nineteenth century, explicitly jump over the city of modernism, hoping to drive that representational order out of their sight … This new discrete time period recognizes that everything in the recent past must be forgotten, eradicated, repressed, or treated as dead and unthinkable, in order to establish a new representational form. So Michel de Certeau claimed, every new time finds its legitimation in what it excludes. Yet this new time nevertheless welcomes the existence of earlier pasts, specified by earlier ruptures before the time of the current division—it even builds representational forms out of materials from these accepted pasts, reorganized by conflicts and interests formed in the present.20 This process, she says, entails “a conscious attempt to eradicate modernism’s oppositional or critical stance.”21 When situated in this postmodern context, we not only better understand the willful forgetting of the Gulf’s modern era but also the concurrent proliferation of pre-oil heritage. Both processes are key to the construction of the postmodern present, a present that obscures not only the modern era’s more oppositional and critical stance but also its more confident and exuberant ethos, and contributes to the manufacturing of the rigid traditional/ hypermodern and local/global binaries that shape perceptions of the contemporary Gulf and 60

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that memories of the region’s early oil modernity disrupt. And yet there is a tendency in the scholarly literature to see this process as somehow exceptional to the globalizing Gulf, where traditional “tribal” societies are coming to terms with becoming cosmopolitan by seeking out an “authentic” and largely “invented” past to counter the dizzying effects of rapid change. There is also a concomitant tendency to deny the Arab Gulf a role in defining not only its own modernity but also what it meant to “be modern” in the Arab and wider world in the middle of the twentieth century. In her chapter in the edited volume The New Arab Urban: Gulf Cities of Wealth, Ambition, and Distress, Amale Andraos critiques the “clichés that assume the opposition between ‘local’ and ‘global’ and the parallel dichotomy between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ ” that remain pervasive in popular and scholarly discourses on the Gulf.22 She provides an excellent critique of the persistent and romanticized belief that “Islamic architecture” is what unifies and permanently represents an authentic Arab urbanism and society. This insistence on pan-Islamism, she argues, “renders it difficult, if not impossible, to reconstitute alternatives that are more fine-grained, subtle, and historically aware.” She advocates locating an alternative identity for the Arab world between a mythical Islamic past and a technologically utopian future. What Andraos is calling for here is a recognition of the “endlessly rich and varied intellectual, political, literary, and artistic Arab record” that contributed to “building a modern, progressive (and secular) Arab nation.”23 My own work on Kuwait’s modern era, and this chapter on modernity in the wider Arab Gulf, concur with her assessment that Arab cities were not places where an “authentic” culture was brutally displaced by an encounter with “Western” modernity, but were places that readily embraced modernism and became, as Arang Keshavarzian and Alex Boodrookas put it in the same volume, an “integral part of its emergence,” both regionally and globally.24 And yet, despite being in a volume on Gulf cities, Andraos’ discussion of Arab modernity and the “lessons of modernism in Arab urban life” focuses entirely on Beirut and Baghdad, cities which she identifies, along with Cairo and Damascus, as the “old centers” of Arab modernization that first “embraced modernism.” Contemporary Gulf cities are presented as “new centers in the Arab modernization process.”25 This dichotomized analysis of the “old” and “new” centers of Arab modernity reinforces a long-standing binary in the scholarly literature between the “great” and “late” cities of the Arab world, first critiqued by Seteney Shami in her work on Amman (one of the “late” Arab cities that earlier scholars of Arab urbanism and modernism ignored, much like the cities of the Arab Gulf),26 as well as by Yasser Elsheshtawy in relation to the Arab Gulf.27 The re-emergence of this binary in Andraos’ chapter inadvertently denies Gulf cities their rightful place among the “old” centers of Arab modernism, and indeed global modernism. To Andraos, the “old centers” of the Arab world “represent a long, rich, and complex dialogue with, struggle over, and acceptance of modernity” as reflected in art, literature, poetry, intellectual and political thought, and architecture and urbanization. She argues that the now devalued and crumbling modernist landscapes of cities like Cairo and Beirut, consisting of modest shopping plazas and generic housing in pre-branded neighborhoods, “signal varieties of the Arab modern.”28 Such modern urban milieus were also constructed in cities like Kuwait, Dubai, and Doha in the early oil decades, but because they have been successfully obliterated from the landscape, or have been overshadowed by the starchitecture of contemporary developments, Gulf cities are not included in this analysis of Arab modernism. When Andraos does discuss Gulf cities’ encounter with modernity, she focuses solely on the “imposed ‘outside’ design” of British and American oil companies’ suburban gated communities that “awkwardly” took root in the region. Saudis, as the only Gulf Arabs to appear in Andraos’ analysis of mid-century Arab modernism, absorbed modernity as technology and infrastructure but not as lifestyle. In fact, she argues that the Saudis turned to Japanese architects “whose respect for 61

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tradition, awareness of cultural specificity, and commitment to a specific national architectural identity rendered them desirable partners for major projects.” In other words, whereas the Arab cities of Beirut, Cairo, and Baghdad exhibited a “creative and resilient embrace of modernity,” the Gulf’s encounter with modernity was imposed, borrowed, restrained, reticent, awkward, and conservative (all terms Andraos uses to describe Saudi’s mid-century development).29 While making room for the “old” Arab centers in global modernism, Andraos contributes to further obscuring the coeval histories and trajectories in which Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE also contributed to the creation of “an Arab progressive identity” in the decades after the discovery of oil.30 This chapter serves as a corrective to the prevailing disregard and denial of the Gulf’s modernity in popular, scholarly, and official narratives of the region’s history. I trace specifically how and why the region’s “modern era” is omitted from state-led heritage discourses and practices that concentrate almost entirely on reifying the pre-oil period in the contemporary city. But I begin by bringing the modern era back into the narrative—by introducing what happened during those in-between decades—in order to ultimately break the traditional/hypermodern and local/global binaries that still saturate how we think, talk, and write about culture in the Arab Gulf. My goal here is not to definitively assert what “modernity” in the Gulf context (or otherwise) is or is not. Nor do I claim that modernity was a positive or negative, successful or unsuccessful, outcome for the Gulf. Despite the rhetoric of high modernist planning ideology, to be discussed below, modernity is not an end product or a result, a reality made all the more salient by the fact that most modernist planning schemes, in the Gulf as elsewhere, failed to produce the egalitarian and orderly cities and societies the avant-garde of that era set out to create. Nor do I suggest that a universalist and all-encompassing modernity affected everywhere and everyone around the world in a uniform manner; indeed, much variety in the experience of early oil modernity exists even within the Gulf. But, as Marshall Berman explains, “what matters is the process, not the result.”31 And indeed, the processes playing out in the Gulf in the middle of the twentieth century were unmistakably modern, riddled as they were with paradoxes, contradictions, intended and unintended outcomes, and top–down ideals challenged by bottom–up aspirations.

Mid-century modernity in the arab Gulf The Gulf was not an isolated or insulated region before oil. The littoral towns of both sides of the water were highly integrated into the complex networks of global capitalism and imperialism since the nineteenth century, well before the coming of oil. Recent scholarship that analyzes Gulf history from a longue durée historical perspective shows that for centuries the people who lived along the Arab Gulf coast participated actively in transnational networks of exchange that crossed not only the Indian Ocean but also the Atlantic.32 These global interactions enabled the growth of port towns like Kuwait, Dubai, Manama, and Muscat into dynamic, hybrid, and cosmopolitan urban centers. A multiplicity of cultural identities in these cities coupled with the mobility of capital and labor across the Gulf and the western Indian Ocean reveals a continuity between then and now amid all the changes; as Lawrence Potter claims, “the success of Dubai today as a center for commerce and tourism rests on solid precedent.”33 In the 1920s and 1930s, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Dubai began implementing modernizing reforms like the establishment of municipalities, education councils, secular schools, and rudimentary town planning, promoting what Fuccaro calls “the new civic spirit of modernity” that was to increase significantly with the advent of state-funded welfare programs in the coming decades.34 So, by the time oil was exported after World War II, the Arab Gulf was already “modern” in many ways. Nonetheless, 62

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after the launch of their respective oil industries, all the Arab Gulf states began to engage in new ways with a particular kind of global modernity in the middle decades of the twentieth century, albeit to varying degrees. Oil was discovered in commercial quantities in 1932 in Bahrain and in the late 1930s in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, though the war delayed the export of oil from these states until the late 1940s. The oil industries of Oman and the states that became the UAE did not launch until the 1960s. Bahrain as the first and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia as the largest Gulf oil exporters took the lead in early oil developments in the region, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s. By the early 1970s, the rest of the Gulf states also began modernizing and were able to accelerate their development schemes with the exponential influx of oil revenues after 1973. The first part of the modernization process was the introduction of modernist city planning principles to modify, enhance, or replace the Gulf’s pre-oil townscapes. Although the West’s post-Enlightenment universalist ideals and assumptions about modernity and linear progress were challenged and changing in the aftermath of World War II and with the advent of decolonization, the post-war decades were particularly hospitable to the emergence of “high modernism” across the globe: “a root-and-branch, rational engineering of entire social orders in creating realizable utopias,” made most manifest in state-led city planning and restructuring.35 James Scott argues that high modernist development required the combination of three elements. First was an aspiration to the administrative reordering and rational engineering of nature and society to improve the human condition, the main exponents of which were usually avant-garde engineers, planners, technocrats, high-level administrators, architects, and so on. Second was a state with relatively unrestrained power to serve as the main instrument to implement and achieve these designs. These were “rulers with grandiose utopian plans for their society,” who had usually “come to power with a comprehensive critique of existing society and a popular mandate (at least initially) to transform it.”36 The third element was a weakened or prostrate civil society that lacked the capacity to resist these plans. In this context, the Arab Gulf city-states in the 1950s and 1960s were high modernist urbanizers par excellence: oil rent had sufficiently transformed state–society relations to produce the latter two elements, while the urbanist avant-garde with the knowledge and expertise of how to plan and design a high modernist city were prepared to travel to this largely unknown region of the world to implement their ideals. In his work on Dubai, Ahmed Kanna briefly asserts that many of that city’s urban projects of the twenty-first century, such as the Palm Jebel Ali, share similarities with high modernist spaces.37 These include the grandiose scale of such projects, their stark monumentality that seeks to inscribe the ruler’s authority onto the spaces of the city, the “death of the street”—the space of pedestrian circulation and informal encounter—such projects engender, and the obsession with visual and rational order that is only ever evident from high above. But while the aesthetics of many contemporary urban projects might bear such reminiscences of high modernism, what they are essentially missing is the social reformist agenda of high modernist urban planning: the combined belief that “scientific and technical instruments of rationality would control chaotic urban form and provide … an improved quality of life for all citizens,” and that urban planning could impose a disciplinary order to control and reform human behavior in an effort to produce a more “efficient, well-behaved, and productive” citizenry.38 All Gulf rulers and states in the early oil period “adopted development as [their] main ideology” and echoed the technical and scientific discourse of the urbanist avant-garde that claimed that top–down planning and development driven by “enlightened and benevolent decision makers” would improve the quality of life of their people and encourage them to “become productive and progressive citizens.”39 Modern state-driven development combined urban planning and the construction of infrastructure—roads, water desalination plants, power stations, new port facilities—with the 63

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provision of new state-funded social services—health care, education, housing, along with fixed wages through public employment—and the production of the spaces these services required such as hospitals, schools, suburbs, and government buildings. As one official Kuwaiti publication put it in 1986,  government interference was imperative from the very beginning because it shoulders the burden of developing the society, modernizing the economy, and fulfilling the individuals’ well-being to make up for years of suffering in the pre-oil phase, and to take a short cut towards the establishment of a prosperous up-to-date society.40 This rhetoric masked the fact that, as Menoret argues in relation to Saudi Arabia, “Development would soon lead to a firmer grasp of the state on people’s lives, and to an increased control over society,” changing the very nature of the state and its relationship to society.41 One of the essential goals of what Scott calls “authoritarian high modernism” was to deploy the power of the state in urban planning in order to make society legible and, in turn, to prevent future unrest and rebellion.42 While Brasília is often studied as the quintessential modernist city in this regard,43 the Arab Gulf has received very little attention in the scholarly literature as a case study of high modernist ideals, successes, and failures. Though the process of modernist city planning played out differently across the region, it often yielded similar results. Manama was the first Gulf town to be modernized into a state capital beginning in the 1930s, but its urban development was relatively slow and did not entail the radical transformation of the urban landscape so common to modernizing cities. Kuwait and Riyadh, on the other hand, were clear case studies in high modernist ideology, where the “prince” and the “genius” planner came together to devise a plan not just to completely transform the cityscape but also to reshape the social order.44 Kuwait’s planners, Anthony Minoprio, Hugh Spenceley, and P.W. Macfarlane were participants in Britain’s post-war New Town Movement; their plan for Kuwait therefore followed the (semi-)circular hub-and-spoke variation of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City from which New Town planners drew inspiration. The Greek architect C.A. Doxiadis, hired by the Saudis to design a new city for Riyadh, was influenced by Cold War containment strategies in his master planning techniques, resulting in Riyadh’s more linear development along a central axis extending out from the old core. This would allow for more flexible growth and “prevent urban unrest by raising standards of living” in the ever-expanding suburbs.45 Although John Harris designed Dubai’s first master plan in 1960, Halcrow & Co. produced a plan for Abu Dhabi in 1962, and Llewelyn Davies created a plan for Doha in 1972 (all British consultants), these plans were devised on much humbler scales. Most notably, Harris was the only planner working in the region who, echoing the sentiments of Dubai’s ruler Rashid Al Maktoum, did not want to raze the old town and advised instead to integrate the old city into the new. Kuwait’s planners had also originally suggested retaining the old town and building a new city adjacent to it, but the ruler Abdullah al-Salem al-Sabah wanted to replace the old with the new. As Khaled Adham suggests, one key reason for the more cautious approaches of the planners and rulers of the southern coastal cities was the more modest financial resources of those states compared with Kuwait and Saudi Arabia at the time.46 In the case of Abu Dhabi, the ruler Shakhbut al-Nahyan is also usually described as being more conservative in his embrace of modernity in contrast to his brother and successor, Zayed, who removed him from power in 1966 to speed up that Emirate’s modernization. A similar narrative rationalizes Oman’s Sultan Qaboos’ 1970 coup against his father. But with or without a high modernist master plan guiding urban expansion and city formation, all the cities of the Arab Gulf shared similar development goals and experienced similar 64

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growth patterns and problems between the 1950s and 1980s. All early urban modernization projects entailed some degree of demolition of pre-oil townscapes, functional zoning (the spatial separation of work, home, leisure, commerce, and industry), the construction of major new road networks and other infrastructure projects, and the creation of new American-style suburbs on the fringes of the old urban cores, where single-family detached villas replaced old patterns of communal living. Meanwhile, the absence of existing administrative apparatuses or systems to take responsibility for physical planning (except in Bahrain) in the early days of oil; the artificial inflation of land values due to the states’ appropriation of urban land for development; rapid and unpredictable demographic growth due to improved standards of living and to immigration; and conflicting interests and overlapping prerogatives among ruling family members, merchant elites, and bureaucrats were all factors that combined in diverse ways and to varying degrees throughout the early oil decades in the Gulf to result in the chaotic growth that defied the order of master plans in the case of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and in the more moderate or even “sluggish” growth of Oman, the UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain.47 The new cities that were produced in these early oil decades may not have been the symbols of rational and progressive modernity that the rulers and their master planners hoped they would be (though architecturally many new buildings and homes that were built during this time were undoubtedly modernist in style). But they were nonetheless quintessentially modern in that they embodied and reflected the chaos, paradoxes, and unintended outcomes of the maelstrom of modernity. Though most of the planners working in the Gulf at the time were European, this was not a simple case of late colonial urban coercion or imposition. In his groundbreaking work on the expansion of socialist architectural practice in the Middle East in the 1970s and 1980s, Łukasz Stanek rightfully “challenges diffusionist notions of architecture’s globalization as ‘Westernization’ and reconceptualizes the genealogy of architectural practices as these became worldwide.”48 He argues specifically that architectural and urban planning knowledge and expertise did not simply flow from the West to the East in the decades after World War II. Rather, this knowledge transfer was multidirectional. Tanis Hinchcliffe similarly asserts that the Arab Gulf states were transforming their physical landscapes with modern buildings at the same time as American and European cities were changing in the middle of the twentieth century.49 In fact, she argues that the work that British firms did in the Gulf between 1950 and 1980 kept the British architectural profession afloat in the post-war era, particularly during periods of recession when the local government had little cash to spend on public projects.50 British architects had to seek work elsewhere to sustain themselves, and it just so happened that “there was a lot of building needed in the Gulf States” in those early days of oil.51 Planning and architectural firms at the forefront of the modernist movement in the West were therefore working simultaneously in the Gulf, where they not only modified and repurposed many of their pre-existing planning principles in conjunction with local practitioners to then be disseminated back to the metropole, but also learned how to improve the durability and longevity of modern building materials like concrete—knowledge which was then applied elsewhere. Stanek has shown that Polish architects working in Kuwait in the 1970s and 1980s “learned at least as much as they brought with them,” and this knowledge became a key asset for Poland’s own urban development after 1989 and the end of socialism.52 For instance, Kuwait was one of the first countries in the world where Computer Aided Design (CAD) software was used on a commercial scale to design buildings beginning in the late 1980s.53 Their knowledge of these programs and other construction technologies and advanced materials that they obtained while working in the Gulf alongside Western firms and local practitioners distinguished these architects when they returned to work in post-socialist Poland. 65

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Furthermore, the encounter between the United States and the Arab Gulf (via Aramco) in the immediate aftermath of World War II was, as Nathan Citino argues, “crucial, because it coincided with the rapid suburbanization of the American populace.”54 Access to Gulf oil was indispensable in shaping ideas about American modernity in the post-war decades, a modernity that hinged on being an “automobile-centered, mass-consumption society” with the tract suburb its spatial manifestation.55 It is not surprising, then, that the mid-century encounter between America and Saudi Arabia “produced strikingly similar urban landscapes,” with “gasguzzlers, tract houses, and urban highways” as the ultimate symbols of capitalist modernity on both sides of the world.56 Thus, as Hinchcliffe argues, “The Gulf States were not trying to keep up with an already well-established modernism, but with a contemporary process that was happening all around the world at that time.”57 The Gulf was also part of a post-World War II global process that Stanek refers to as mondialization, whereby “visions of global cooperation and solidarity” that took the entire world (rather than Cold War ideological blocs) “as a dimension of practice and imagination” contributed to the emergence of architecture as a worldwide techno-scientific phenomenon in the middle of the twentieth century.58 Indeed, Kuwait’s Cold War “neutrality” allowed it to maintain close relations with its Western allies while also accepting assistance and expertise from the Soviet bloc to realize its own economic and development goals. Gulf cities were therefore not only key to defining mid-century modernism globally but were also active agents in constructing their own interpretation and dialectic of modernity in a Cold War context. The advent of modernist city planning triggered another principal feature of the Gulf’s early oil modernity: suburbanization, the move out of the courtyard house of the old farij (urban quarter) to a single-family villa in a new planned neighborhood, which Matthew MacLean describes as “a critical aspect of the collective Emirati national [and by extension collective Gulf] experience.” In his seminal work on suburbanization in the UAE, MacLean defines suburbs as “places not in the urban core, not rural, and [that] involve some form of separation between home and work necessitating commuting by automobile.” In the early days of oil, suburbs were usually located just on the outskirts of old urban cores, “on the edges of the desert,” and were usually products of these cities’ first urban plans mentioned above.59 As Robert Vitalis, Nathan Citino, Nelida Fuccaro, and Reem Alissa have shown, suburban living first came to the Gulf through British and American oil companies like Aramco, Bahrain Petroleum Company, and Kuwait Oil Company even before the states in which they operated commissioned their aforementioned master plans. In what Alissa describes as a form of “colonial modernity,” the oil companies constructed company towns in the desert to house their foreign employees in American- or British-style “Garden Suburbs” with single-family homes and gardens built along treelined grid streets, with recreational facilities, schools, and other suburban amenities.60 Like their antecedents in American cities and in British colonial cities, these gated enclaves were deeply segregated along ethnic lines that both created and reinforced racial and class hierarchies inside and outside the camps. These oil towns influenced the establishment of new suburbs by indigenous governments across the region from the 1950s onwards. For example, according to Menoret, the new suburban neighborhood of al-Malazz northwest of Riyadh’s city center, designed in the 1950s to house civil servants and their families, drew inspiration from Aramco’s Home Ownership Loan Program and American engineering used in eastern Arabian towns designed to house the company’s Arab employees, outside the limits of the “American Town” of Dhahran. Like these new oil company suburbs, al-Malazz contained large streets laid out on a grid, with single-family villas and enclosed gardens.61 But it was not only the style of company housing that came to influence state-sponsored suburbs in the region; local governments also adopted policies of socio-spatial segregation that inscribed new social hierarchies—for instance, 66

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between townspeople and sedentarizing Bedouin (in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia) or Shiʿa agriculturalists (in Bahrain), or between citizens and non-citizens—onto the urban landscape.62 As was occurring in every city around the world in which suburbs were introduced, the structure of, and lifestyle embodied in, the single-family detached villa was dramatically different from the multi-family courtyard houses of the pre-oil period. There was certainly some resistance to this new kind of home and lifestyle, as Citino has shown in his analysis of Aramco’s suburbs for Arab employees.63 But there was also an attraction to the orderliness and hygiene of suburbia in contrast to the courtyard clusters of the old towns. Alissa has shown that urban Kuwaitis were actually envious of the residents of the KOC town of Ahmadi, located nearly 40 kilometers south of the city, “because it was so quiet, well-planned, clean, aesthetically pleasing, the garbage was collected nicely, the colors of the houses were always clean and vibrant.”64 Despite initial suspicions and misgivings about having to move out of their old houses into new suburbs, in many Gulf cities “planned neighborhoods and suburban villas soon became the standard of what it meant to live a ‘modern’ life.”65 By 1965, just over a decade into suburbanization in Kuwait, “the idea of living ‘independently’ on one’s privately owned property was described in public discourse as part of the Kuwaiti family’s ‘nature’ and ‘tradition.’ ”66 As described by MacLean, Emiratis recounting their memories of home, neighborhood, and childhood in a 2007 oral history collection called Awwal Manzil (First Home) remembered that when moving from the old farij to the new suburb, their parents and grandparents were “quite willing to embrace change and discard the material culture of the past.”67 Similarly, when in 1956 Zahra Freeth, a British woman who grew up in Kuwait in the late 1920s and early 1930s, took photographs of some of the older houses due to be demolished, her Kuwaiti friends grew “impatient at my interest in the Kuwait of the past, and asked why I wasted time on the old and outmoded when there was so much in Kuwait that was new and fine.” As one young woman told her, “ ‘Let them be demolished! Who wants them now? It is the new Kuwait and not the old which is worthy of admiration.’ ”68 After centuries of living under harsh economic and climatic conditions before oil, people in the Gulf were open to change if it meant improvement in their everyday lives, and were not overly sentimental (yet) about those changes. The urban landscapes of the pre-oil era were associated with a life of hardship and need while the new city and its suburbs symbolized unprecedented wealth, progress, and modernity. Indeed, there was a pragmatism involved in the embrace of suburbs that reflected a wider general response to modernity, captured well by Ian Fleming (of James Bond fame) during a trip to Kuwait in 1960. He marveled at how unsurprised Kuwaitis were by modern mechanical inventions like automobiles, telephones, or televisions. As modes of transport, cars were seen as no different from donkeys or camels except that they needed petrol to run instead of water.69 The spread of modern education through state-funded schools rooted in scientific and secular learning fostered a “fascination with technology (al-handasiyyah) and science.”70 In what Fuccaro identifies as an “indigenous modernity” (to emphasize that this was not simply an imposition or aping of “Western” culture),71 positive images of progress and efficiency became identified with modern state-provided services like health care and education as well as with consumer goods like automobiles, gramophones, and radios (the modernist “icons of the 1950s”).72 The 1961 Kuwait Oil Company film Close-Up on Kuwait provides an account of some of the commodities making their way through the Kuwaiti port at that time: “motorcars and razorblades, aircraft and chocolates, furniture and tennis rackets, frozen foods and feather dusters, cameras and candelabra, microscopes and magazines, timber, steel, and string.”73 General department stores and modern shopping arcades were constructed in nascent central business districts to display and sell all these new commodities: along Fahad al-Salem Street and in the district of Salmiya in Kuwait, around Bab al-Bahrayn in Manama, in Deira in Dubai, and in Msheireb in Doha. 67

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Young people coming of age in the modernizing Gulf were not just consumers of modern commodities but were also engaged in debating and discussing what it meant to “be modern” in these early days of oil. In Kuwait and Bahrain, for instance, they established journals and civil society clubs and organizations in which they discussed how to “[lift] their societies from what they saw as a state of rajiya (backwardness) to a state of nahda (progress) and civilization.” As Haya al-Mughni argues, rajiya “was interpreted as being the result of rigid traditions and ignorance, whereas taqaddum [progress] was equated with scientific knowledge, cultural advancement and democracy,” as well as the emancipation of women.74 Meanwhile, newspapers and radio broadcasts from Cairo, Baghdad, and Beirut were as voraciously consumed as were luxury goods in the first decades of oil, exposing the masses to the news and political rhetoric that was spreading across the Arab world in the politically charged 1950s. As Fuccaro argues, “There was no inherent contradiction between consumer hedonism and political activism.”75 Whereas the standard literature on the so-called “ruling bargain” that has supposedly shaped state–society relations in the Gulf since the advent of oil suggests that citizens relinquished political rights and ideology with the advent of oil for a combination of state welfare and market-oriented consumerism, in the early oil decades being consumers and political activists is what made young men and women in the Gulf “modern social beings,” ones who devoured propaganda and political ideology as much as they did Coca-Cola and cars.76 Just as they were willing to embrace the accouterments of modern suburban living, young people in the Gulf also absorbed new political ideologies like Arab nationalism and socialism, and supported regional and global causes like the liberation of Palestine and anti-colonialism. Here again we see how the Gulf in the early oil period was able to combine American-influenced capitalist ideals of “suburban domesticity and consumption”77 with new leftist political ideologies in the construction of its own distinct interpretation of modernity at the height of the Cold War. Perhaps one of the most salient aspects of the mid-twentieth century that is entirely erased from those teleological narratives of state-led development and progress in the Gulf that project a seamless jump from pre-oil poverty to twenty-first century prosperity is the wave of volatile political opposition and protests against the oil companies, the British, and the rulers after World War II that reached a climax during the Suez Crisis of 1956. Ahmed Kanna correctly argues that the threats posed by the political opposition to the ruling dynasties in the 1950s should not be minimized (as the scholarly literature particularly on the UAE and Qatar tends to do).78 Though eventually crushed, these political crises were instrumental in catalyzing many modern statedriven developments (from city planning to the advent of citizenship laws to the creation of modern police forces) aimed to control and depoliticize the population: both citizens and noncitizens, from oil workers to the new intelligentsia. Though political activism played out differently across the region, during the early to mid-1950s in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Dubai, and Qatar collectively, oil worker strikes, Arab nationalist demonstrations, and anti-British protests and boycotts unleashed a wave of political agitation never seen before, or since, on the streets and in the markets of Gulf cities. Political opposition forces combined grievances against the oil companies with broader pan-Arab causes (like Palestine and Suez), demands for economic and social reforms, calls to end ruling family authoritarianism in favor of political representation and participation, and anti-British fervor. The latter increased substantially after the bombing of Port Said in 1956, and demonstrations on the streets of Gulf towns turned violent before rulers used force to restore order. Part of the rhetoric against the British in Bahrain and Dubai included an emergent anti-foreigner discourse aimed at Persian and Indian merchants, who were seen as instruments of state and British oppression and obstacles (like the rulers themselves) to national progress. Furthermore, the ideology of Arabism had been spreading across the region since the 1930s through the Arabic press and Arab teachers working in the Gulf. Part of 68

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the populist rhetoric of Arab nationalism was the promotion of an “indigenous” national identity that ethnically excluded people of non-Arab (e.g., Persian, Baluchi) descent, even as the nationalists condemned the sectarian cleavages promoted by the policies of backward and conservative rulers. Though Arab nationalism was part of the “modernist project of popular representation and labour rights”79 and was therefore a key component of mid-century modernism in the Gulf, pan-Arabism inadvertently began to erode the cosmopolitan tradition of Gulf port cities, particularly once this ambiguous “ethno-nationalism” was exploited by the state. Indeed, the Arab nationalist opposition unwittingly provided Gulf rulers with the prescription they needed to define national identity in a way that could stabilize their own positions in the decades after the Suez Crisis. What Kanna calls the “family-state” (in his analysis of Al Maktoum-controlled Dubai) manipulated the imagery and ideology of Arab nationalist rhetoric by representing itself as “the guardian of these ethno-nationally inflected values” and as the protector of the citizenry from the threats posed by foreigners, particularly to national identity and culture. In this way, “mid-twentieth-century nationalist discourses of self-determination became transformed into late twentieth and early twenty-first century discourses of economic autochthony and ethnonationalism or ‘ethnocracy.’ ”80 From the late 1950s onwards, Gulf rulers employed multiple tactics, from the passing of exclusive citizenship laws to the building of national museums, to carefully construct this ethnocentric national identity of which they continue to position themselves as guardians.

Depoliticizing the past Kanna argues that after Dubai’s reformist struggles of the 1950s, part of the Al Maktoum family’s attempt at state-building entailed the political demobilization of the populace and the eradication of non-state-sanctioned popular movements. This required the “depoliticization of contemporary Dubai time and space,”81 that is, both the city of Dubai as a spatial landscape and its historical narrative had to be emptied of all trace of, and opportunity for, political struggle or socio-cultural diversity. The depoliticization of the historical narrative was achieved by the family-state’s control of the “discourse of identity”82 and a “(re)interpretation of potent local symbols” such as the family, the traditional village, the Bedouin tribe, and so on. Kanna describes such discourses as “neoorthodox … to point out that they are not traditional at all, but very contemporary responses to problems of Dubayyan modernity.”83 In neoorthodox narratives, the polity is reimagined as ethnically, linguistically, and religiously pure, patriarchal, consensual, and autochthonous, “emerging whole cloth from a time and place in which these qualities are thought to have prevailed”—that is, the pre-oil town, or what Kanna refers to as the imagined “vanished village.”84 Deviations from or challenges to such reified models of family and consensual village life are labeled threatening to the culture and values of the nation, of which only the  rulers are the real guardians and protectors. Such threats include immigrants, claims to national citizenship, shifting gender roles and aspirations, and political criticism or dissent of any kind. Permitting these “outside” influences to penetrate Emirati society (as they did in the early oil decades) jeopardizes the survival of the Emirati family—the individual family as well as the national family. Hence the Emirates’, and in fact all Gulf states’, notoriously strict citizenship and marriage laws that seek to protect the imagined national community “as autochthonous, primeval, and in need of defense against further incursions into its qualitatively unique way of life.”85 In this state discourse, which prevails across the Arab Gulf, the preservation of cultural identity based on family and tradition becomes the principal responsibility of the ruling family 69

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(in Kuwait, the only Gulf nation with a popularly elected legislature, Islamist parliamentarians since the 1990s have also positioned themselves as competing guardians of an authentic premodern identity grounded in Islam).86 But, again, there is nothing singularly or monolithically traditional, authentic, or orthodox about such neoorthodox discourses and depictions of national identity and culture. It is the states’ response to the rapid changes of the middle of the twentieth century described above, changes that threatened the ruling dynasties’ ability to control and pacify their subjects. Neoorthodoxy is thus “part of a larger family-state–centered hegemonic project to marginalize reformist tendencies and to replace them with the politics of paternalism, dependency, and popular deactivation.”87 Since the late 1990s, neoorthodox discourses lamenting the loss of the “vanished village” have been given physical form in numerous replica “heritage villages” and refurbished pre-oil courtyard houses that now adorn most Gulf cityscapes. Sulayman Khalaf has written extensively on the cultural discourses associated with contemporary “heritage” activities like the construction of heritage villages and the restaging of “traditional” events like camel racing, poetry recitals, and pearl diving that are “geared towards maintaining the nation’s sense of cultural authenticity (asala), celebrating the achievements of national leadership and safeguarding against the global culture, which is regarded by many as a generalised threat to the local cultural identity.”88 He analyzes the ways that Gulf rulers position themselves as patrons and guardians of national culture and identity through the invention of heritage as part of the nation-building process. Here he invokes Eric Hobsbawm’s notion of invented traditions as “a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past.”89 For instance, Khalaf has analyzed Kuwait’s Seaman’s Day Village and its associated Pearl Diving Festival, both inaugurated on the country’s twenty-fifth national day on February 25, 1986. During the annual festival, Kuwaiti boys went out on a simulated pearling voyage to experience the hard work and tribulations of their forebears. Central to the discourse surrounding the festival (in the songs that were sung, speeches made, and newspaper articles written during the event in the 1980s and 1990s) was a celebration of the rulers and the state in promoting national unity and traditional values in Kuwait’s youth, values rooted firmly in the era before oil, modernity, and affluence. For instance, during the opening speech of the inaugural festival in 1986, a former ship captain who organized the festival’s expedition said: This young generation grew up in today’s society of plenty and urban comfort. Our youth have forgotten what manual work is all about … We are here to experience and remember the harsh life of our fathers and grandfathers. All this is made possible by the support and wise leadership of His Highness the Emir and His Faithful the Crown Prince … The main goal is to train our sons about the old sea life ways and its challenges and also to make them value the high morals our grandfathers upheld for the common good of their community. This experience will do away with social differences among our young sons as they have to work hard, shoulder to shoulder, as one team on their pearling ships.90 Khalaf argues that the cultural capital that such heritage projects bring to the image of Gulf rulers has been as essential to the nation-building process as has the financial capital generated by oil wealth with which the state built “an extensive welfare system that reflected a new paternalistic, humane and caring image of the state.”91 However, as he rightly argues, the state’s appropriation of national heritage is not peculiar to the Gulf but occurs in all societies dealing with challenges 70

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of state-building, particularly those undergoing rapid transformations, wherein states often resort to popular folk culture to create an image of “unified imagined political communities with modern state national ideologies.”92 In the Gulf context, invented traditions have become part of state-led neoorthodoxy that seeks to depoliticize the past by replacing memories of conflict with narratives of consensus. As will be discussed further, this neoorthodoxy is complicit in the forced forgetting of what happened during those in-between decades that has resulted in the erasure of the modern era from current historical narratives of the Gulf. Kanna reveals how Emirati citizens today have internalized this neoorthodox discourse, romanticizing the social solidarity and consensual relations of pre-oil “village” life, while lamenting the loss of the traditional customs and values of the past with the coming of modernity. This discourse echoes the “cultural attack” against their local Islamic values that Exell claims many Gulf residents today feel as their countries become enmeshed in globalized systems and practices.93 However, Kanna recognizes that this nostalgic rhetoric is a romanticized and idealized interpretation of the past rather than a simple and apolitical response to change. It is a product of the state’s depoliticization of space and time in the decades after the turbulent, dynamic, and exciting days of early oil modernity when Gulf residents embraced change with a confidence, pragmatism, and resilience that threatened the political durability of ruling dynasties in favor of political participation and pluralism. In his aforementioned work on suburbanization in Ras al Khaimah, MacLean provides another example of this neoorthodox rhetoric in action. In 2007, the narrators of Awwal Manzil demonstrated a sense of nostalgia for their old pre-oil neighborhoods. In such narratives, “The freej [ farij ] was the spatial embodiment of purity, cultural authenticity, neighborliness, and virtue,” while the new suburbs “weakened the social connections produced in the freej.” As one citizen and historian, Abdullah Ali al-Tabur, said:  Most of the contemporary buildings in which the citizens live today do not derive their soul from our history and society, but are copied from the architecture of the West. This is a great mistake, for it has a negative influence on the identity of the national family.94 Such nostalgic sentiments that harken back to an immutable and homogenous cultural identity grounded in the region’s uncontaminated pre-modern past coupled with the rhetoric that modernity was simply “copied” from the West without any local agency or context is pervasive throughout the Gulf today.

Modernist forgetting But it must be emphasized, again, that this nostalgia for the old farij did not emerge at the time that Gulf citizens first moved to their new suburban homes. Rather, in the early days of oil, the Gulf seemed to be immersed in a type of forgetting that Paul Connerton refers to as being “constitutive in the formation of a new identity.”95 As one of seven types of forgetting he identifies, Connerton describes this forgetting as “part of the process by which newly shared memories are constructed because a new set of memories is frequently accompanied by a set of tacitly shared silences.” That is, as a new life and identity are being constructed and shared across a society (such as the economic prosperity and improved living conditions brought about by oil modernity, consumerism, and suburbanization) certain memories of the past (like the crowded courtyard houses of the old farij) are collectively and willfully forgotten. This kind of forgetting was part of every modernist project that combined the:  71

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objective transformation of the social fabric unleashed by the advent of the capitalist world market, which tears down feudal and ancestral limitations on a global scale … [with] … the subjective transformation of individual life chances, the emancipation of individuals increasingly released from fixed social status and role hierarchies.96 To the extent that these two interrelated processes were embraced—as they actively were by Gulf societies in the middle decades of the twentieth century—certain things had to be forgotten and discarded. As a society forges a whole new life world and identity, “not to forget” could “provoke too much cognitive dissonance.” Memories of the old life that oil was replacing, like old buildings, if retained, would become pieces of an old puzzle that would prevent a new puzzle from fitting together properly. What was allowed to be discarded would provide living space for new projects.97 And so, as British planners working in Kuwait in the late 1960s put it, “most Kuwaitis do not value old buildings as highly as we are inclined to, and some even welcome the idea of ridding Kuwait of everything to do with the past.”98 This shedding of the pre-oil landscape and lifestyle, at the time it was occurring, was not shrouded in the “discourse of loss” that characterizes contemporary nostalgia but rather reflected what Andreas Huyssen describes as “the fundamental shift in structures of feeling, experience, and perception” experienced by the modern subject.99 Indeed, forgetting that is constitutive in the formation of a new identity is less about “the loss involved in being unable to retain certain things as rather the gain that accrues to those who know how to discard memories that serve no practical purpose in the management of one’s current identity and ongoing purposes.”100 Only in Oman was this deliberate and purposeful forgetting more tenuous in the early decades of oil modernization (which began there in 1970). This was because, as Mandana Limbert has shown, “Oman’s post-1970 era of political stability, oil wealth, prosperity, and modernity … was also often understood as anomalous. It was thought of as a time ‘in between’ times of political instability and poverty.”101 The precariousness of Oman’s oil supply, which, it was assumed, would eventually run out, meant that “modernity” was not “a trajectory of infinite progress, but an interlude.”102 The idea that Oman could very realistically revert back to the past at some point in the not-so-distant future meant that the rapid modernization the country experienced in the 1970s and 1980s could not so optimistically and confidently entail discarding the past to make way for the present and future. Amid all the changes, therefore, there remained “multiple processes of interpreting and enacting” the pre-1970 past, from bodily habits to ideas of religiosity to the “management of objects that retained their symbolic significance despite a vastly altered social and economic environment.”103 Although there was not yet a strong sense of nostalgia for the pre-oil past elsewhere in the modernizing Gulf prior to the late 1990s, a sense of disillusionment with the urban landscape that oil built did begin to emerge in the early 1980s in the UAE and in Kuwait, which was “expressed by a turn towards images, ways of use, and patterns of movement referring to ‘traditional’ urbanism.”104 The growing disenchantment with the architecture and urbanization of the early oil decades that emerged in the 1980s was not only felt in Kuwait and the Gulf but elsewhere across the world at the same time, when a realization of the shortcomings of modernity created a desire in city building to “explicitly jump over the city of modernism, hoping to drive that representational order out of their sight,” and to welcome back earlier pasts that modernism drove away.105 This was part of a broader “shift in international architectural culture associated with postmodernism.”106 Much of the criticism in the Gulf at the time had less to do with the alienating nature of modernist architecture or the loss of tradition or cultural identity that we so commonly hear in present-day nostalgia, and more to do with the poor state of the physical landscape. In particular, Stanek shows that much of the disappointment with the construction 72

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of the 1950s and 1960s targeted the rapid obsolescence of buildings, particularly due to “the one material most strongly associated with the modern movement: reinforced concrete.”107 In addition, the shoddy construction of public housing (particularly those built for lower-income groups like the Bedouin), the lack of pavements in the cities and suburbs due to the abundance of parked cars, and the existence of vast empty sandlots that became dumping grounds for construction debris were all signs of the failure of modernist city building that by the 1980s, in true postmodernist fashion, triggered a sentiment among professionals, academics, journalists, and inhabitants “that urbanization patterns of the previous two decades needed to be left behind.”108 It was in this context that a general sense emerged in the late 1980s, primarily in Kuwait where the modernist project had the most comprehensive impact, that perhaps turning to the past might restore visual “character and coherence” to the cityscape.109 This resulted in some rudimentary “city beautiful” campaigns that included the refurbishment of dilapidated historic sites like the old markets. However, far from being nostalgic for a lost cultural identity wiped out by modernity, such projects focused on tidying up the city center to enhance Kuwait’s public image of “urban progress,” as the Minister of Public Works put it in 1990.110

repressive erasure Kuwait’s early turn to pre-oil heritage in the mid- to late 1980s was interrupted by the Iraqi invasion four years later. But by the late 1990s, all Arab Gulf states, including Kuwait once again, began to see a boom in their heritage markets, which has yet to abate. For well over twenty years, state-sponsored heritage practices and discourses in the Gulf have concentrated almost entirely on the pre-oil period, with next to no projects or museums commemorating the region’s early oil modernity (apart from a few recent exceptions, primarily in Kuwait). As already argued earlier and by other scholars, state-constructed discourses that romanticize the pre-oil past in contemporary heritage projects and that are echoed in popular nostalgia distort the realities of the pre-oil past (there was a reason why certain memories were discarded in the early oil decades in the formation of a new identity). For example, to return to Khalaf’s analysis of Kuwait’s pearl diving festival, in addition to its depiction of the rulers as “benevolent, caring and committed to the welfare of [the] people,” the state legitimizing discourse associated with the festival omits the class, ethnic, and religious tensions and conflicts that existed before oil, particularly the class interests that “infested the traditional pearling industry” and that kept pearl divers and sailors in perpetual debt bondage to shipowners and merchants.111 These hardships are recounted in the traditional poetry and folklore of the time, but are forgotten in the modern invented traditions of pearling and the discourses produced by these heritage practices. In the latter, the only sign of struggle is with the sea, but it is a struggle that is depicted as building character, community, and cohesion. Indeed, across the Gulf states, pearling is reified in national museums and heritage projects as a symbol of the will, strength, and resilience of pre-oil society. Popular memory today reinforces this idealized image of pearling. As one of the Emirati men that Kanna interviewed put it,  We worked in the sea. You would work and work and maybe you wouldn’t even earn 1000 rupees in a whole year. But if you got 200 rupees you’d be comfortable … In the past, the body was tired, but the heart was peaceful.112 The dysentery, blindness, injury, and death that so often occurred on board ship, and the debilitating and heritable debt that came with being a pearl diver, are omitted and forgotten. Pearling and other maritime trades are depicted in museums such as Kuwait’s more recently opened 73

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National Maritime Museum as tools, musical instruments, pieces of paper, photographs, and models of beautiful, sterile dhows displayed outside with stilts and spotlights that make them visible from the adjacent Arabian Gulf Road. But at the time of the transition from the pre-oil maritime economy to oil modernity, pearling was something to be deliberately and consciously forgotten—vilified for its cruelty and discarded from the modern cityscape. In 1972, the Kuwaiti film-maker Kaled Sidik produced Kuwait’s first feature film, Bas Ya Bahar, the English translation of which is The Cruel Sea. Sidik’s view of pearling is anything but romantic or ideal: the father of the protagonist Musaʿed loses his arm in a shark bite, his son is obligated to inherit his debt and dive for his former captain, the parents and other townswomen are in anguish as their sons and husbands leave for the ghaus and wait anxiously for the next three months for their return, life on ship is cramped and illness abounds, and ultimately Musaʿed is killed at sea. The film also depicts other realities that are absent from neoorthodox narratives depicting pre-oil life as consensual and blissful: class prejudices are revealed when a rich merchant refuses to let his daughter Noora marry Musaʿed, the son of a pearl diver, and the harsh realities faced by many townswomen come to light when Noora, a teenager, is forced to marry an old man who rapes her on their wedding night. Sidik is no more nostalgic for life before oil than were his contemporaries. In 1970, a number of representatives of seafaring and merchant families were invited to meet the Council of Ministers to give their views on banning dhows from Kuwait City’s waterfront. When Violet Dickson, the wife of a former British political agent and Zahra Freeth’s mother, told one of these men she hoped they had told the government to keep the picturesque dhows,  [he] looked slightly taken aback, and said, “No; we all agreed that it was a good idea to get rid of them from new Kuwait. Then we can have an elegant promenade along the front, and not the untidy mess that the boats make when they come into harbour.”113 This is historical discarding to make space for a new identity in action. While much has been written about how heritage sanitizes and idealizes the past by eliminating memories of hardship or conflict (in the Gulf as elsewhere), I further argue that contemporary romanticized reifications of the pre-oil past also contribute to the forgetting of the modern era by creating a direct link between the pre-oil period and the present while eliminating everything that happened in between. For instance, during the inaugural pearling festival in 1986, a song written by the then ruler’s brother, Fahad al-Ahmed al-Sabah, included the lyrics: “Oh people of this land, Together close your ranks, young and old, Stand together for our land, We are for Her forever, Under the glory of our Sheikh.”114 By associating the Amir, as symbol of national unity, with the “community” and “team” spirit of the days before oil that he “wisely” sought to revive (as per the aforementioned organizer’s speech), the pearling festival eliminated the turbulent decades between 1946 (when the oil industry was launched) and 1986 that were mired by deep political opposition and conflict resulting in the unconstitutional dissolution of parliament in 1976 and again in 1986, only months after the launch of the pearling festival. While there was apparently much to be learned about life before oil, there was nothing of value, it would seem, for young Kuwaitis in the 1980s and 1990s to “experience and remember” about the nahda of Kuwait’s early oil decades.115 In her analysis of pearling museums in the United Arab Emirates (in which she argues that museums constitute a safe space where different emirates “assert their own identities” without threatening the national narrative of the UAE), Victoria Penziner-Hightower gives further indication of how present-day museums that focus on the pre-oil past are involved in processes of forgetting the in-between decades in other ways.116 Sharjah’s Maritime Museum emphasizes the emirate’s own “place in global trade, as 74

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though Sharjah was the centre of the emirates and not Abu Dhabi.” As she puts it, this “timeless narrative of Sharjah’s greatness … implores visitors to forget the mid-century poverty.” That is, the museum creates a direct link between Sharjah’s “cosmopolitan, yet traditional past” and its rapidly advancing present while omitting the less glamorous decades in between.117 But unlike modernism’s forgetting in the creation of a new identity, the current discarding of the modern era occurring across the Arab Gulf states is more complex. It comes about from two simultaneous processes: the erasure of the modernist period from sight (like the first time, which largely occurs through demolition, that is, by deliberately not preserving the past) coupled with the reification of the period that came before the modern period. This dual process also takes with it the memory of the discarding of the pre-oil past that deliberately occurred in the early oil years as part of the process of creating a new modern identity. That is, when memories of the Gulf’s early oil modernity are erased, we also erase the memory of the fact that Kuwaitis, Bahrainis, Saudis, and Emiratis all actively and assertively discarded their old ways of life as they embraced new ways of being modern as depicted in the first half of this chapter. What was then intentionally and confidently discarded is now represented nostalgically as having been inadvertently misplaced, fallen away in the disorienting maelstrom of modernity—and restored in sites of national heritage. In this nostalgic discourse of loss, modernity is not only vilified but also negated and, ultimately, erased. This current forgetting of the modern era is akin to what Connerton refers to as repressive erasure. Repressive erasure, he says, can be used to bring about a historical break. It edits out, omits, and silences memories of struggle, of a past that might pose a political challenge in and to the present.118 We have already seen how neoorthodox narratives of the “vanished village” contribute to erasing the political reformist struggles of the mid-twentieth century from Dubai’s historical narrative. Thomas Fibiger provides an excellent example of repressive erasure in the Bahraini government’s March 2011 demolition of the Pearl Monument where the uprisings of the previous month had occurred. Bahrain’s Foreign Minister said the monument was demolished to remove a “bad memory” to allow the country to heal.119 For the protestors, this was an act of repressive erasure of their grievances, oppression, and ongoing alienation. As Fibiger claims, Bahrain (as elsewhere in the Gulf) has a long-standing record of forgetting the history of political reform.120 While the demolition of Pearl Monument is a clear act of repressive erasure, this type of imposed forgetting “need not always take malign forms … it can be encrypted covertly and without apparent violence.”121 A subtler erasure of Bahrain’s modern era can be found in the country’s participation in the Venice Biennale’s 14th International Architecture Exhibition in 2014. The overall theme of the biennale was “Absorbing Modernity: 1914–2014.” Bahrain’s pavilion was curated by the famous Lebanese architect Bernard Khoury and George Arbid, Director of Beirut’s Arab Center for Architecture (which collects and disseminates information on modern architecture, planning, and urban design in the Arab world). It is noteworthy that while Bahrain’s 2010 biennale pavilion—titled “Reclaim” and consisting of three reconstructed fisherman’s huts as a commentary on the decline of Bahrain’s historic maritime culture in response to the biennale theme “People Meet in Architecture”—was commissioned to two Bahraini architects, a pavilion that had to respond to a theme on modernity was commissioned to nonBahraini Arab curators. The latter 2014 pavilion, titled “Fundamentalists and Other Arab Modernisms,” consisted of a vast rotunda of shelves containing thousands of copies of the same book, prepared for the pavilion, that documented seminal modernist buildings from around the Middle East and North Africa between 1914 and 2014. Andraos describes the Bahrain pavilion as “a manifesto for the region’s ability to not only ‘absorb modernity’ … but to find in modernism’s generic and abstract nature universal qualities of the region’s social ambitions, inventions, and 75

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adaptations.”122 However, unlike Kuwait’s and the UAE’s pavilions in the biennale that same year (both of which addressed the impact of modernity on their own cities and societies, the former in a critical analysis of state-led planning and the latter in the creation of an interactive archive of materials relating to the Emirates’ urban history), Bahrain focused on a broader Arab modernism in which its own engagement was largely absent. In addition to sidelining Bahrain’s own embrace of and participation in Arab and global modernity, when read more critically in the context of the country’s post-2011 political context, Bahrain’s sponsorship of a celebration of “Arab” modernism can be interpreted as a slight to its Shiʿa, particularly Ajam, population who made up a significant portion of the opposition (in a move similar to the renaming of Pearl Roundabout as Al-Farooq Junction after a Sunni caliph that is contested by the Shiʿa).123 Other kinds of demolition, not of monuments but of the modernist landscape, constitute acts of repressive erasure that appear more apolitical than the demolition of Pearl Monument but enact similar processes of forced forgetting. In Kuwait, while much demolition has occurred because of the poor quality and obsolescence of many early oil buildings, numerous structures such as the country’s iconic modernist cinemas have been eliminated in recent years despite pleas by architects, activists, and members of the public to renovate and rehabilitate them. In 2014, for instance, a public protest was held to save the city’s iconic Chamber of Commerce building, which in the 1970s was adorned on stamps as a symbol of Kuwait’s architectural modernism (the building was demolished a few months later).124 Elsewhere, the Gulf’s modernist landscape has also been deliberately removed to make way for reifications of the pre-oil past alongside new hypermodern architecture, to create that visual juxtaposition and link between then and now described at the start of this chapter. Doha’s Msheireb district is a prime example of this process. In the early 2010s, buildings constructed in the 1970s during the city’s early oil development (mostly nondescript modernist apartment buildings that by then were occupied by Arab and Asian nationals) were demolished en masse to make way for the new Msheireb district. According to the website, the project aims “to address a gap in the architectural history of Qatar and rediscover a unique form of Qatari urban development.”125 The perceived “gap” between then and now is actually the early oil period of less glamorous and more “sluggish”126 development that the present-day district, like Sharjah’s museums, urges us to forget by erasing that landscape from sight and from memory. In its place is a new state-of-the-art landscape and architectural design that is supposed to bridge that “gap between the Doha of the past and the Doha of tomorrow” by integrating “the true spirit and aesthetics of Qatari architecture with modern, highly functional and sustainable development.” According to the project website, this “new architectural language was created to counteract the depletion of Qatar’s unique cultural and architectural heritage.” It is clear in this discourse that the early oil modernist buildings that were systematically demolished to create this new district were not part of Doha’s “architectural heritage that is in danger of extinction.” That heritage resides solely in the pre-oil period, exemplified by four renovated courtyard houses in which new “heritage” museums were opened alongside the district’s residential properties, high-end commercial establishments, and offices. “What is worth being preserved and what period of history is recognised and labelled as ‘authentic’ by the actors and decision-makers involved,” as Nadine Scharfenort questions in her analysis of Msheireb, is never neutral or self-evident and must be interpreted in broader political and discursive contexts.127 Not preserving anything from the region’s modern era while only making room in contemporary urban landscapes for pre-oil heritage is a form of repressive erasure that has created a historical break between the present and the Gulf’s early oil, mid-century past. The narratives of Msheireb’s museums also help to erase “bad memories” that the state would rather forget. The Mohammed bin Jassim House “introduces the transformation of 76

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Msheireb over time through recalling memories of its past, showcasing its present and engaging visitors in the plans for the future.” Most emphasis is on the pre-oil past, though it is possible to “hear former residents speak of Msheireb as the home to Qatar’s first hotel, first bank, first pharmacy and first cafés.”128 Beyond such “firsts,” however, there is little reference to what life in the district was like between the 1970s and 2000s, or to the non-Qatari nationals who occupied Msheireb for decades before the development of this project that explicitly aims to attract Qatari nationals back to the city center. The Company House, meanwhile, tells the story of the early days of the country’s petroleum industry, with a focus on the Qatari workers who “helped transform Qatar into a modern society.” According to the website,  Undaunted by challenges and setbacks, these Qatari pioneers demonstrated remarkable dedication, ushering in the era of oil exploration. Follow them as they endured the rough journey to Dukhan with smiles, all the while yearning for their loved ones left behind in Doha.129 Nowhere in this narrative is the tense history of labor strikes and disputes that plagued Qatar’s oil industry in the 1950s and 1960s, or of the contentious events that occurred in 1956 when “well organized oil strikers” aligned with Arab nationalists and dissenting members of the Al  Thani family to protest against the ruler and the British, when 2,000 protestors marched through the center of Doha before being dispersed by the ruler’s armed retainers.130

Conclusion The Msheireb museums exemplify Karen Exell’s argument that national narratives exhibited in Gulf museums and heritage sites:  construct a standard periodisation of archaeological time, immediate pre-oil time (usually up until the 1950s or 1960s) and the present, with little to inform the visitor of the transitions between these periods, and little to connect them with the lived experience of recent history.131 What she identifies here is the absence of the modern era—the in-between decades—from the historical narrative of the Gulf. One Kuwaiti museum she examines, a private collection known as Bait al-Othman, provides some evidence (such as old uniforms of Kuwait Airways cabin crew) of a more “cosmopolitan and avant-garde” Kuwait of the in-between decades. Exell describes the mid-century Kuwaiti lifestyle depicted in Bait al-Othman as one of a “sophisticated, creative and bohemian society,” which she correctly contrasts with the “traditional, idealised and generic” pre-oil dioramas of the national museum.132 Like Bait al-Othman, there are some initiatives currently emerging across the Arab Gulf states that seek to remember the forgotten in-between decades of the region’s early oil modernity, and in so doing, challenge several of the local versus global and traditional versus modern stereotypes that still characterize much popular and scholarly discourse on the contemporary Gulf (including Exell’s own work on museums). Modern Architecture Kuwait, for instance, is an exhaustive, two-volume publication that painstakingly brings together drawings, plans, and detailed information on over 150 urban projects constructed between 1949 and 1989 that made Kuwait a critically and globally important site of late modernist architecture.133 In 2014, local architects and heritage experts also submitted a petition to have the iconic modernist Kuwait Towers, a cluster of water towers opened in 1977 that serve as the national landmark, listed as a 77

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UNESCO World Heritage Site. According to the submission, “this modern architectural monument is an expression of an exciting era when different cultures entered into a dialogue that is tolerant to the multiplicity of human values.”134 Reflecting the local/global binary that still permeates much academic research on the Arab Gulf, some scholars have argued that “foreign” entities such as UNESCO are based on Western “value systems” that are antithetical and alienating to indigenous values and impose “heritage forms in a language that struggles to communicate with the people they are intended to represent.”135 But, proving otherwise, Kuwaitis themselves are striving for recognition of their country’s important place in global modernism that is otherwise denied by official, popular, and scholarly discourses that define local heritage solely in terms of Islam or traditional “folklore.”136 As another example, in 2010, Zayed University professor Michele Bambling and a small team of Emirati women established the Lest We Forget archival initiative that in 2015 led to an exhibition of Emirati family photographs taken between 1950 and 1999 depicting “the curiosities of modernity.”137 The enormous and ongoing success of this collection to which families continue to contribute challenges the notion, expressed in the introduction of a volume on cultural heritage in the Gulf, that the region’s “culture of privacy prohibits the public display and consumption by non-locals of significant cultural expressions.”138 It also upends the assumption that the world is divided by different and opposing “value systems”: in 2019, a second exhibition titled Lest We Forget: The Universality of Family Photographs displayed late-twentieth century family photographs from the UAE alongside ones from Spain to reveal the “commonalities of human experience, thought and feeling.”139 Such projects are going a long way to finally show, as this chapter has attempted to argue, that the mid-century Arab Gulf states were not places where Western-style modernity was simply diffused or imposed without any local agency or participation. The Gulf, in the early decades of oil, was a site of experimentation of modernist city planning that contributed to the transfer of knowledge across the globe. It also constituted a key region of the world in which definitions of what it meant to “be modern” in the decades after World War II—in an era of suburbanization, conspicuous consumption, and political activism—were taking shape. Remembering the modern era remembers that the Arab Gulf once exhibited a confident capacity to change, adapt, and reshape itself without being overwhelmed by feelings of loss or of so-called “cultural attack.” The nostalgic lament for a pre-oil past seemingly obliterated by the region’s meteoric pace of urbanization and globalization that permeates both official and popular discourse today erases decades of flux and excitement, tension and struggle, mistakes and paradoxes that occurred between then and now. Whether it be political challenges to the rulers, the slow pace of early oil development (in most places other than Kuwait and Saudi Arabia), or the confident discarding of pre-oil lifestyles, so much of what happened during those in-between decades across the Arab Gulf significantly challenges the aforementioned state-driven teleological narrative of a smooth, linear, and heroic leap from tradition to hypermodernity—that caricature of the Gulf’s historical transformation that foregrounds a refurbished courtyard house against a skyline of gleaming skyscrapers. Remembering the modern era dispels the clichéd myth that the Gulf is unlike any other place in the world, and situates the region’s experiences of modernity and postmodernity in a more comprehensive and realistic global historical context.

Notes 1 Ahmed Kanna, Dubai: The City as Corporation (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 1. 2 Ibid., 4. 3 Ibid., 3.

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Modernity and the Arab Gulf states 4 John W. Fox, Nada Mourtada-Sabbah, and Mohammed al-Mutawa, “The Arab Gulf Region: Traditionalism Globalized or Globalization Traditionalized?” in Globalization and the Gulf, eds. John W. Fox, Nada Mourtada-Sabbah, and Mohammed al-Mutawa (London: Routledge, 2006), 6. 5 Miriam Cooke, Tribal Modern: Branding New Nations in the Arab Gulf (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014), 13. 6 Ibid., 31 (my emphasis). 7 Sarina Wakefield, “Heritage, Cosmopolitanism, and National Identity in Abu Dhabi,” in Cultural Heritage in the Arabian Peninsula: Debates, Discourses, and Practices, eds. Karen Exell and Trinidad Rico (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2014), 99–115; Karen Exell and Trinidad Rico, eds., “Introduction: (De)constructing Arabian Heritage Debates,” in Cultural Heritage in the Arabian Peninsula: Debates, Discourses, and Practices (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2014), 10; and Paul Dresch, “Foreign Matter: The Place of Strangers in Gulf Society,” in Globalization and the Gulf, eds. John W. Fox, Nada Mourtada-Sabbah, and Mohammed al-Mutawa (London: Routledge, 2006), 200–222. 8 Fox, Mourtada-Sabbah, and al-Mutawa, “The Arab Gulf Region,” 3. 9 Karen Exell, Modernity and the Museum in the Arabian Peninsula (London: Routledge, 2016), 68. 10 John W. Fox, Nada Mourtada-Sabbah, and Mohammed al-Mutawa, “Heritage Revivalism in Sharjah,” in Globalization and the Gulf, eds. John W. Fox, Nada Mourtada-Sabbah, and Mohammed al-Mutawa (London: Routledge, 2006), 266. 11 Farah al-Nakib, “Legitimizing the Illegitimate: A Case for Kuwait’s Forgotten Modernity,” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 28, no. 1 (2016): 7–22. 12 Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1983), 35 and 132. 13 Nelida Fuccaro, “Introduction: Histories of Oil and Urban Modernity in the Middle East,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 33, no. 1 (2013): 1 and 3. 14 Pascal Menoret, Joyriding in Riyadh: Oil, Urbanism, and Road Revolt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 63. 15 Farah al-Nakib, Kuwait Transformed: A History of Oil and Urban Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), 7. 16 Stephen Gardiner, Kuwait: The Making of a City (Harlow: Longman Group, 1983), 14. 17 M. Christine Boyer, The City of Collective Memory: Its Historical Imagery and Architectural Entertainments (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 5. 18 Richard Dennis, Cities in Modernity: Representations and Productions of Metropolitan Space, 1840–1930 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008) 1. 19 Nathan Citino, “Suburbia and Modernization: Community Building and America’s Post-World War II Encounter with the Arab Middle East,” The Arab Studies Journal 13/14, nos. 2/1 (2005/2006): 41. 20 Boyer, The City of Collective Memory, 5–6. 21 Ibid., 6. 22 Amale Andraos, “Problematizing a Regional Context: Representation in Arab and Gulf Cities,” in The New Arab Urban: Gulf Cities of Wealth, Ambition, and Distress, eds. Harvey Molotch and Davide Ponzini (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 58–59. 23 Ibid., 66. 24 Arang Keshavarzian and Alex Boodrookas, “Giving the Transnational a History: Gulf Cities across Time and Space,” in The New Arab Urban: Gulf Cities of Wealth, Ambition, and Distress, eds. Harvey Molotch and Davide Ponzini (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 43. 25 Andraos, “Problematizing a Regional Context,” 68–69. 26 Seteney Shami, “Researching the City: Urban Space and its Complexities,” in Amman: The City and Its Society, eds. Jean Hannoyer and Seteney Shami (Beirut: Centre d’Études et de Recherches sur le Moyen-Orient Contemporain, 1996), 47–48. 27 Yasser Elsheshtawy, “The Middle East City: Moving Beyond the Narrative of Loss,” in Planning Middle Eastern Cities: An Urban Kaleidoscope in a Globalizing World, ed. Yasser Elsheshtawy (London: Routledge, 2004), 4. 28 Andraos, “Problematizing a Regional Context,” 69. 29 Ibid., 68 and 70. 30 Ibid., 71. 31 Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air, 50. 32 See, for instance, Matthew Hopper, Slaves of One Master: Globalization and Slavery in Arabia in the Age of Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015); and Fahad Bishara, A Sea of Debt: Law and

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33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Lawrence Potter, “Society in the Persian Gulf: Before and After Oil,” CIRS Occasional Paper no. 18 (Doha: Center for International and Regional Studies, 2017), 5. Nelida Fuccaro, Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf: Manama Since 1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 195. James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 97. Ibid., 89. Ahmed Kanna, ed., “Dubai, In Particular: Anomalous Spaces and Ignored Histories in the ‘Superlative City,’ ” in The Superlative City: Dubai and the Urban Condition in the Early Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 125–126. Boyer, The City of Collective Memory, 11–12. Menoret, Joyriding in Riyadh, 115 and 90. Barges Humoud Al-Barges, A Twenty-Five Year Era of Kuwait’s Modern Advancement: On the Occasion of the Silver Jubilee of the National Day on February 25, 1986 (Kuwait: Kuwait News Agency Information and Research Department, 1986), 32. Menoret, Joyriding in Riyadh, 101. James Scott, “Authoritarian High Modernism,” in Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 87–102. See, for instance, James Holston, The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilía (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989). Holston, The Modernist City, 9–10. Menoret, Joyriding in Riyadh, 69. Khaled Adham, “Rediscovering the Island: Doha’s Urbanity from Pearls to Spectacle,” in The Evolving Arab City: Tradition, Modernity, and Urban Development, ed. Yasser Elsheshtawy (New York: Routledge, 2008), 225. Adham, “Rediscovering the Island,” 225. Łukasz Stanek, “Mobilities of Architecture in the Global Cold War: From Socialist Poland to Kuwait and Back,” International Journal of Islamic Architecture 4, no. 2 (2015): 365. Tanis Hinchcliffe, “British Architects in the Gulf: 1950–1980,” in Architecture and Globalisation in the Persian Gulf Region, eds. Murray Fraser and Nasser Golzari (New York: Routledge, 2016), 27. Ibid., 23–24. Ibid., 27. Stanek, “Mobilities of Architecture in the Global Cold War,” 366. Ibid., 389. Citino, “Suburbia and Modernization,” 39. Ibid. Menoret, Joyriding in Riyadh, 108. Hinchcliffe, “British Architects in the Gulf,” 27. Stanek, “Mobilities of Architecture in the Global Cold War,” 366–367. Matthew MacLean, “Suburbanization, National Space and Place, and the Geography of Heritage in the UAE,” Journal of Arabian Studies 7, no. 2 (2017): 162. Reem Alissa, “The Oil Town of Ahmadi since 1946: From Colonial Town to Nostalgic City,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 33, no. 1 (2013): 41. Menoret, Joyriding in Riyadh, 80–81. See, for instance, Farah al-Nakib, “Revisiting H . ad.ar and Badū in Kuwait: Citizenship, Housing, and the Construction of a Dichotomy,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 46, no. 1 (2014): 5–30; Menoret, Joyriding in Riyadh; and Fuccaro, Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf. Citino, “Suburbia and Modernization,” 45–49. Alissa, “The Oil Town of Ahmadi since 1946,” 53. Menoret, Joyriding in Riyadh, 81. Al-Nakib, Kuwait Transformed, 186. MacLean, “Suburbanization, National Space and Place,” 166. Zahra Freeth, Kuwait Was My Home (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1956), 83. Ian Fleming, “State of Excitement: Impressions of Kuwait,” unpublished manuscript, Indiana University, Bloomington, c.1961, 50.

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Modernity and the Arab Gulf states 70 Nelida Fuccaro, “Shaping the Urban Life of Oil in Bahrain: Consumerism, Leisure, and Public Com­ munication in Manama and in the Oil Camps, 1932–1960s,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 33, no. 1 (2013): 61. 71 Fuccaro, “Introduction,” 5.  

72 Fuccaro, “Shaping the Urban Life of Oil in Bahrain,” 62.  

73 Close-Up on Kuwait, directed by Rodney Giesler, produced by Kuwait Oil Company Film Unit

(United Kingdom: Huntley Films, 1962), www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoN45z15My4&feature=y outu.be. 74 Haya al-Mughni, Women in Kuwait: The Politics of Gender (London: Saqi Books, 2001), 53–54. 75 Fuccaro, “Shaping the Urban Life of Oil in Bahrain,” 61. 76 Ibid. 77 Citino, “Suburbia and Modernization,” 40. 78 Kanna, Dubai: The City as Corporation, 25. 79 Fuccaro, Histories of City and State in the Persian Gulf, 189. 80 Kanna, Dubai: The City as Corporation, 26. 81 Ibid., 31. 82 Ibid., 133. 83 Ibid., 31. 84 Ibid., 110. 85 Ibid., 116. 86 Al-Nakib, “Legitimizing the Illegitimate,” 18–20. 87 Kanna, Dubai: The City as Corporation, 110. 88 Sulayman Khalaf, “The Nationalisation of Culture: Kuwait’s Invention of a Pearl-Diving Heritage,” in Popular Culture and Political Identity in the Arab Gulf States, eds. Alanoud Alsharekh and Robert Springborg (London: Saqi, 2008), 64. 89 Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in The Invention of Tradition eds. Eric Hob­ sbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1. 90 Khalaf, “The Nationalisation of Culture,” 54–55. 91 Ibid., 44. 92 Ibid., 69. 93 Exell, Modernity and the Museum in the Arabian Peninsula. 94 MacLean, “Suburbanization, National Space and Place,” 166. 95 Paul Connerton, The Spirit of Mourning: History, Memory, and the Body (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 36. 96 Ibid., 38. 97 Ibid., 37–38. 98 Colin Buchanan and Partners, “The Short-Term Plan Volume III: Kuwait Town Plan and Plan Implementation,” Studies for a National Physical Plan for the State of Kuwait and Master Plan for the Urban Areas (Kuwait: Kuwait Municipality, 1971), 13. 99 Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 24. 100 Connerton, The Spirit of Mourning, 37. 101 Mandana Limbert, In the Time of Oil: Piety, Memory, and Social Life in an Omani Town (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 3. 102 Ibid., 9. 103 Ibid., 12. 104 Stanek, “Mobilities of Architecture in the Global Cold War,” 365. 105 Boyer, The City of Collective Memory, 5. 106 Stanek, “Mobilities of Architecture in the Global Cold War,” 367. 107 Ibid., 386. 108 Ibid., 376. 109 Peter Smithson and Alison Smithson, “Proposals for Restructuring Kuwait,” Architectural Review 156 (1974): 183. 110 Hadi Hussain, “Wazir al-ashghal: al-sabʿinat badaʾ al-milad al-haqiqy li-tahdith al-Kuwait wa-l­ tatawwur al-ʿumraniy marhun bi-l-hifadh ʿala turathina” [“Minister of Public Works: The Seventies saw the Real Birth of Kuwait’s Modernity, and Urban Development Depends on the Preservation of our Heritage”], al-Rai al-ʿAam, February 26, 1990; for more on this, see Farah al-Nakib, “Kuwait’s

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111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139

Modern Spectacle: Oil Wealth and the Making of a New Capital City, 1950–90,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 33, no. 1 (2013): 7–25. Khalaf, “The Nationalisation of Culture,” 67. Kanna, Dubai: The City as Corporation, 115. Zahra Freeth, A New Look at Kuwait (London: Allen and Unwin, 1972), 101. Khalaf, “The Nationalisation of Culture,” 50. Ibid., 54. Victoria Penziner-Hightower, “Purposeful Ambiguity: The Pearl Trade and Heritage Construction in the United Arab Emirates,” in Cultural Heritage in the Arabian Peninsula: Debates, Discourses, and Practices, eds. Karen Exell and Trinidad Rico (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2014), 71. Penziner-Hightower, “Purposeful Ambiguity,” 78–79. Connerton, The Spirit of Mourning, 41. Thomas Fibiger, “Potential Heritage: The Making and Unmaking of the Pearl Monument in Bahrain,” Journal of Arabian Studies 7, no. 2 (2017): 195. Fibiger, “Potential Heritage,” 200–201. Connerton, The Spirit of Mourning, 42. Andraos, “Problematizing a Regional Context,” 71. Fibiger, “Potential Heritage,” 204. For more on the erasure of Kuwait’s modernist landscape, see al-Nakib, “Legitimizing the Illegitimate.” Msheireb Properties, “About Msheireb Downtown Doha: Mandate,” 2019, www.msheireb.com/ msheireb-downtown-doha/about-msheireb-downtown-doha/mandate. Adham, “Rediscovering the Island,” 225. Nadine Scharfenort, “The Msheireb Project in Doha: The Heritage of New Urban Design in Qatar,” in Cultural Heritage in the Arabian Peninsula: Debates, Discourses, and Practices, eds. Karen Exell and Trinidad Rico (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2014), 201. Msheireb Properties, “Msheireb Museums: Mohammed bin Jassim House,” 2019, www.msheireb. com/msheireb-downtown-doha/msheireb-museums/about-msheireb-museums/mohammed-bin-jassimhouse. Msheireb Properties, “Msheireb Museums: Company House,” 2019, www.msheireb.com/msheirebdowntown-doha/msheireb-museums/about-msheireb-museums/company-house. Jill Crystal, Oil and Politics in the Gulf: Rulers and Merchants in Kuwait and Qatar (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 125–127. Exell, Modernity and the Museum in the Arabian Peninsula, 175–176. Ibid., 172. Roberto Fabbri, Sara Saragoça Soares, and Ricardo Camacho, Modern Architecture Kuwait: 1949–1989 (Salenstein: Niggli Verlag, 2016); and Ricardo Camacho, Sara Saragoça Soares, and Roberto Fabbri, eds., Essays, Arguments and Interviews on Modern Architecture Kuwait (Salenstein: Niggli Verlag, 2017). UNESCO World Heritage Center, “Abraj al-Kuwait,” June 12, 2014, https://whc.unesco.org/en/ tentativelists/5933. Exell and Rico, “Introduction,” 7. Ibid., 10. Jennifer Piejko, “Lest We Forget: Emirati Family Photographs 1950–1999,” Artforum, www.art forum.com/picks/lest-we-forget-emirati-family-photographs-1950-1999-59086. Exell and Rico, “Introduction,” 10. Warehouse421, “Lest We Forget: The Universality of Family Photographs Set to Open at Warehouse421 on 12 June,” June 12, 2019, www.warehouse421.ae/en/media/press-releases/lest-weforget-the-universality-of-family-photographs-.

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Evolving Family PattErns  

in thE arabian PEninsula  

Amira Sonbol

Announcing the creation of the position of Minister of Happiness in 2012, the UAE proceeded to launch a program through which sixty selected top executives were to be trained as stateofficers of happiness. The e-Government portal of the UAE described this endeavor as present­ ing “A Guide to Happiness and Well-being at workplace”1 and called it a national agenda by which “the UAE Government aims to make the country amongst the top five happiest coun­ tries in the world by 2021.”2 Declared goals included the establishment of a “cohesive society and preserved identity,” well-being and raising “morale across an organisation,” and boosting “engagement at work … [building] trust and loyalty among colleagues and between the employees and the institution itself.”3 The national charter for happiness approved by the cabinet concerned itself with the community, with work, and the environment. The model followed by the UAE was that launched by the United Nations in 2013 as a yearly celebration of an International Day of Happiness reflecting rising concern with human happiness as a growing issue.4 While this is far from a new quest for humanity, this renewed interest in the search for happiness related directly to contemporary concerns about social, polit­ ical, and economic crises facing humanity today, and even more immediately business worries, productivity, and economic growth. The cultural commitment to happiness promoted new efforts to associate work with happiness, through experiments in human relations techniques or just piped-in music. It inspired new workplace standards that instructed white-collar employees and sales­ people in the centrality of cheerfulness. It spawned new commercial empires such as the Walt Disney Company, whose corporate motto became “make people happy” and whose employees convinced customers that they were already happy simply because they were in a Disney setting. It prompted “happy meals.”5 This quote echoes an article, “The Secret of Happiness: Family, Friends and your Environ­ ment,” published by the Independent as part of its response to the question “How do you find contentment in an acquisitive society?” The answer given was: “By changing the things you spend your money on.”6 A policy of happiness then is presented as one way of facing declining economies and social crisis. “We’ve suffered horrendous job cuts and plummeting investment values, and watched the high streets grow increasingly pockmarked by empty shopfronts, even 83

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as we face public sector job losses and the possibility of a double-dip recession.”7 Dubai, facing economic recession during the last few years coupled with family crisis, as this chapter will discuss, has turned to various ways to respond and answer; like other countries and organiza­ tions, happiness seemed to present an opening. Its National Programme for Happiness mentions the family several times under the chapter titled “Promoting the Health of our People,” where pri­ ority is given to the balance between time spent at work in contrast to time spent with family and friends. “A healthy work–life balance boosts happiness and helps people thrive both at the workplace and at home.” Quoting Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, ruler of Dubai, the charter declares, “The poor person is rich with their family, the small one is big with their family, and the weak one is strong with their family. And so it is with the nation that brings us together as one family.”8 The modern family in Arabia has gone through major transformations over the decades, and none more so than perhaps in the last few years of the twenty-first century. While country members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) continue to hold on to the nuclear family as the legal basis of their laws and their constitutions where such exist, in actual fact the nuclear family of today is very different to what it was when it was first introduced into their systems in the last decades of the twentieth century. In what follows, the basic laws and basic beliefs regarding the family in countries of Arabia will first be discussed, then the challenges that the family faces today, and the transformations it is experiencing will be analyzed with particular concerns to marital crisis that confront these communities.

The family in law The constitution of Qatar is representative of similar documents of GCC countries. The cen­ trality of the family to the nation’s policies is clearly stated in Article 21: The family is the basis of the society. A Qatari family is founded on religion, ethics, and patriotism. The law shall regulate adequate means to protect the family, support its structure, strengthen its ties, and protect maternity, childhood, and old age.9 The concern with family covers all its members particularly those considered dependents and hence in need of protection; such protection can be found in the constitutions of other coun­ tries of the Arabian Peninsula. The constitution of Bahrain, for example, declares: The family is the basis of society, deriving its strength from religion, morality and love of the homeland. The law preserves its lawful entity, strengthens its bonds and values, under its aegis extends protection to mothers and children, tends the young and protects them from exploitation and safeguards them against moral, bodily and spiritual neglect.10 As for the Emirati constitution, it echoes that of Bahrain and Qatar: “The family shall be the basis of society. Its support shall be religion, ethics and patriotism. The law shall guarantee its existence and shall safeguard it and protect it from corruption.”11 The constitutions of the Emir­ ates and Bahrain also echo Qatar’s in regards to concern for dependents, almost consistently referring to these as women, children, and the elderly. Development plans are also included in these documents; human development figures strongly in all, even while economic develop­ ment takes various types of emphasis and directions. Notwithstanding some differences, the philosophy underlying the articles of the constitu­ tions and the laws that appear in the various legal codes of these countries shows that at the heart 84

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of these laws is a modern patriarchal family. Holding on to traditions, to Islam, and to identity (hawiyya) are basic concerns of these constitutions and continue today to be at the heart of efforts to mold a citizenship at once Muslim, Arab, and Khaleeji, but also modern, developed, and very involved in sustainable development of the physical, intellectual life, and happiness of their citizens. But here lies the basic contradiction between what is to be guarded and what the historical process is actually bringing about. The programs pushed to bring about modern devel­ opment and economic growth paralleling new technological, business and security challenges, also envision holding on to the fundamental principles of religious and tribal authority. Perhaps the constitution of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia best exemplifies and amplifies these concerns: The family is the kernel of Saudi society, and its members shall be brought up on the basis of the Islamic faith, and loyalty and obedience to God, His Messenger, and to guardians; respect for and implementation of the law, and love of and pride in the homeland and its glorious history as the Islamic faith stipulates.12 The Constitutional articles that follow talk about goals to “strengthen family ties, maintain its Arab and Islamic values,” that “Saudi society will be based on the principle of adherence to God’s command,” and that “consolidation of national unity is a duty.” To achieve this, “educa­ tion will aim at instilling the Islamic faith in the younger generation … [to make of them] members who love their homeland and are proud of its history.” This unitary approach to pol­ itics would be based on a unitary policy toward wealth that places it in the hands of the state. Chapter 4, titled “Economic Principles,” states that:  All God’s bestowed wealth, be it under the ground, on the surface or in national ter­ ritorial waters, in the land or maritime domains under the state’s control, are the prop­ erty of the state as defined by law. The law defines means of exploiting, protecting, and developing such wealth in the interests of the state, its security and economy.13 Private property is to be protected, human rights would be based on the Islamic Shariʿa and, as part of a feudal reciprocal relationship, Article 27 explains welfare rights:  The state guarantees the rights of the citizen and his family in cases of emergency, illness and disability, and in old age; it supports the system of social security and encourages institutions and individuals to contribute in acts of charity.14 The welfare rights included in the Saudi constitution are echoed in that of other countries of the Arabian Peninsula. The Omani constitution, for example, states:  The State guarantees aid for the Citizen and his family in cases of emergency, sickness, disability, and old age according to the social security scheme. The State shall work for the solidarity of the Society in bearing the burdens resulting from national disasters and catastrophes.15 It continues to give particular emphasis to health services and the provision of public employ­ ment described as “a national service.” Oman’s constitution also emphasizes education and the state’s role in providing education for its citizens. Where the Omani constitution differs from the others is in regards to the clear statements regarding personal freedoms including “freedom 85

Amira Sonbol

to practice religious rites” and “the freedom of opinion and expression.” While such freedoms are referred to in other constitutions, they do not go into the details and extent as that of Oman. Yet, when it comes to family, the centrality of the family to the state system of Oman holds a similar position as other countries of the area. “The family is the basis of the society and the Law regulates the means for protecting it, preserving its legitimate entity, strengthening its ties and values, safeguarding its members and providing suitable conditions to develop their potential and capabilities.”16 When it comes to the interpretation of constitutional statements into law, there are both consistencies and differences between the countries of the GCC reflecting the different make­ up of the countries, the actual socio-economic conditions, and the particular stress paid to religious and tribal traditions. Saudi Arabia, a country highly dependent on its resources from Islamic religious observances and basing the legitimacy of its rulers on their role as protectors of the holy places of Mecca and Medina being the most conservative when it comes to family. Interestingly, it is not the imagined tribal structure that is held on to constantly that the laws are supporting, but it is a form of the nuclear family with a patriarchal Islamic edge that has dominated since the beginning of modernization in the last century. This very family is itself  transforming and mutating today and presenting challenges facing their societies and governments in the twentieth century. For example, while the Saudi constitution guarantees welfare and services, to be paid for by the monopoly the rulers hold over all its riches, in fact, poverty has grown and it is not easy to provide what is needed as demands, needs, and expectations grow. Similar problems are faced by the other oil-rich countries with heavy item expenses and the pressures of development, security needs, and massive “spectacle” projects including high-rise buildings, expensive museums, importing armies of foreign labor, and holding on to the standard of living that its citizenry have become accustomed to. Strategies meant to create new con­ ditions have included cutting down on the importation of foreign labor and opening up labor markets to locals. Qatar launched its “Qatarization” project, whose results can be felt in govern­ ment offices and services particularly with the growth in numbers of Qatari women who have entered employment. Women’s public work, once frowned upon and confined to limited areas like teaching, has grown and expanded to include almost every profession with the exception of dangerous jobs, fieldwork, and high-level government positions. Even the latter has seen an opening up and the inclusion of women as ministers is a growing phenomenon. In the Emirates, 30 percent of the ministers are women including the Minister of State for International Cooperation and Minister of Culture and Knowledge.17 Qatar declared its intention to promote women’s role in government and sees its educational projects as one way of achieving this. The first woman to become a minister in Qatar held the brief of the Ministry of Education in 2003. Qatar University was headed by a woman, and its Faculty of Shariʿa was headed by a woman— this is unprecedented for any Muslim country. At the time of writing, Qatar’s permanent rep­ resentative in the United Nations is a woman. According to World Bank statistics for 2018, labor force participation of women over the age of fifteen is 44 percent in Bahrain, it is 58 percent for Kuwait, 31 percent for Oman, 58 percent for Qatar, 23 percent for Saudi Arabia, 51 percent for the UAE, and 6 percent for Yemen. Except for the Yemen, where war has had devastating effect on the economy and infrastructure as a whole, the figures for the other countries of Arabia are strong when compared to the numbers of the Arab world as a whole at 21 percent, and worldwide at 48 percent.18 These clearly impressive figures however reflect the work of women expats, who are included in the International Labour Organization (ILO) statistics. For Qatar, for example, the Qatari govern­ ment statistics show that 64 percent of women working in Qatar were expats while one-quarter 86

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was Qatari.19 Qatar’s educational numbers are also high, standing at 88 percent of women pur­ suing higher education.20 Contradictions between the growth of women’s participation in the economy and their participation in political life and decision-making puts into question the actual success of GCC countries toward sustainable development. For example, and notwithstanding the high figures for women’s participation in the labor force and the high percentages for women in education, Qatar continues to be weak in the world Gender Inequality Index, “with a ranking of 114 out of 152 countries.”21 This is recognized by Qatar, whose aims are toward women’s empower­ ment as part of the national strategy. Qatar has made significant strides over the years to ensure women’s full participation in the wider economy. Qatar’s Permanent Constitution envisages a society based on justice, freedom and equal opportunities for all citizens with firm commitment to empowering women. The growth guidelines, including the Qatar National Vision 2030 (QNV) and the National Development Strategy 2011–2016, target inclusive long-term growth.22 Another country reflecting similar patterns like Qatar is Kuwait. According to ILO figures for 2017, the figure of 58 percent for women’s economic participation was higher than that of men.23 Completion of primary education for women was at 97.6 percent compared to men’s 100 percent, and twelve Kuwaiti women were included in Forbes’ list of “100 Most Powerful Arab Women,” one of whom is Deputy Group CEO of the National Bank of Kuwait. Others are founders of major international investment houses, directors of logistic companies, and one is chairperson of Kuwait’s flagship airline, Kuwait Airways.24 When it came to political parti­ cipation, however, “the proportion of women in ministerial positions” is 6.7 percent, which may be an improvement from 1.5 percent in 2000, but shows an astonishing slow growth given the numbers of women in the work force and receiving an education.25 Similar contradictions are evident in statistics regarding women’s labor and participation in Saudi Arabia, which announced its plans to extend greater freedoms and rights to women as part of an opening up of Saudi Arabia to economic diversification as it moves toward what was referred to as a post-oil economy. The rise in women’s participation in the work force “from 17.4 percent in 2017 to 19.6 percent in 2018” is highlighted.26 At the same time, Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 emphasizes the kingdom’s intention to open up avenues for women to reach “new levels of leadership and economic empowerment.”27 Studies written about Saudi women entre­ preneurs refer to the various start-ups women are launching in Saudi Arabia; for example, one article featured a custom-made cakes and cookies business as a successful case. The article also corrects the information regarding the actual female economic participation from 19.6 percent in 2018 to 30.9 percent, given the wider involvement of women in expanding non-formal and new businesses.28 The figures given for women’s participation vary from one source to the other, with the inclusion of only reported wage-labor being one important reason for this vari­ ation. The percentage of Saudi women’s parliamentary participation has also risen, reaching 20 percent in 2018.29 The contradictions become particularly evident with regard to family law. As a step toward reform and greater rights for women, Saudi Arabia has made it legal for women to open busi­ nesses “without the consent of a husband or male relative.” This was described as the kingdom’s push “to expand a fast-growing private sector.”30 However, the laws still require the approval of the husband, father, brother, or male family member to act as guardian for a woman to have a passport issued, to be admitted to school or a club, to have a driving license issued, or even to 87

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get married. A woman may hold a job as a CEO or work in government positions at all levels, from an executive to a passport worker, but she cannot take decisions about her personal life or professional development without a male relative’s approval. The fact that this gives the male relative ultimate control over whatever income the woman receives for her labors—directly through coercion or indirectly through fear and intimidation—is not considered in the law. Saudi Arabia is not unique with regard to the contradictions between encouraging women to work and denying women control over decisions regarding their own personal lives. In the Emirates, while the numbers of women entering the labor force has seen significant growth from 28 percent in 1990 to 42 percent in 2019,31 and while today it is normal for Emirati women to hold positions such as CEO’s of major companies and as ministers of state, Emirati family laws, despite assuring the rights of women, continue the same practices of a patriarchal family. The formula presented in the basic laws of the state included in the National Charter, begins with an emphasis on traditions: “Respect for Emirati traditions will support the emerging role of women empowerment in all spheres.” This statement talks about women’s empower­ ment but co-joins this with a framework of traditionalism.32 Thus, Article 19 of the Personal Status Law of the Emirates defines marriage as “a contract that legitimates enjoyment between spouses; its aim is protection and forming a steady family under the husband’s care on basis ensuring to the spouses the assumption of its charges with affection and compassion.”33 This definition works for other countries of Arabia notwithstanding differences in the actual wording —a family headed by a male and under his care. While harmony and affection are to be the basis of the marriage, the law set conditions to deal with conflict: “Spouses are bound by the con­ ditions exchanged except those legitimising the illicit or banning the legitimate” (Article 20.1). The law requires the acceptance of the bride for a marriage to be contracted; still the “contract is invalid in the absence of a tutor” (Article 39), who is a male relative, usually the father.34 If no such relative exists, then the judge would act as tutor; the term tutor is used as a replacement for the term guardian even though their function is the same. The Emirati family, like other families of the Gulf, has at its heart the principle of obedience to the husband as the legal head of the family. The different constitutions of GCC states confirm the wife’s rights to her own private property and each confirms specific types of rights and lan­ guage, all from within parameters of Shariʿa and tradition. Thus, Emirati family laws guarantee the wife’s control over her own property and Article 54 explicitly speaks of marriage as “legiti­ mate mutual enjoyment of each other” (Article 54.1) and “care of children and their education” (Article 54.4) as mutual obligations of husband and wife.35 The language used, the careful tex­ tualization and the organization of the laws, gives the document as a whole a more equitable approach to the rights of women. Still, and in contradistinction to the conciliatory tones, the laws stand as a challenge to the very efforts of the Emirates to open up its economy and grow its business potential with women’s greater participation. For example, Article 56 concerning the “Rights of the husband towards his wife” is direct in its details of what is expected of a wife: “1. Willful obedience. 2. House supervision and preservation of its contents. 3. Suckling his children from her unless there is an impediment.” These are a wife’s obligations in return for living support, referred to as “alimony” in the document. Such alimony, however, was to be refused in cases set up by laws that forfeit her rights to her husband’s financial support. Article 71.4 makes a wife’s refusal “to travel with her husband without a lawful excuse” as one con­ dition for forfeiting her right to financial support. Article 72 sets out the reciprocal relationship basic to Fiqh discourses that make a woman’s mobility almost totally controlled by her husband. 1

A wife may go out of her home in the instances that allow her to do so by law, custom or in case of necessity and this is not considered a transgression to the duty of obedience. 88

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2

Shall not be considered a transgression to the duty of obedience her going out to work if he married her while engaged in work, if he accepted, after marriage, that she be employed or if she put it as a condition in the contract and, in this latter case the authorised marriage official has to ascertain the existence of such condition upon contracting. This of course unless the fulfilment of such condition is against the interest of the family.36

In other words, while marriage laws allow a woman to work if she receives marital approval, this can always be rescinded if “the fulfillment for such condition is against the interest of the family,” with the interest of the family defined according to custom and to a legal system that considers the wife’s first duty is to the home and its protection (Article 56). Finally, since the wife cannot leave a marriage without her husband’s approval, this places her and her property actually under his direct or indirect control. Thus, the law defines divorce as being the right of the husband (Article 100) and requires that khulʿ divorce that is instigated by the wife be granted only with mutual agreement between the couple (Article 110.1). The only way by which a wife can control her fate within the marriage is by being given control of divorce at the time the contract is signed, a situation that is rarely realistic due to social concerns with shame attached to it.37 There are many other aspects of family law in the Gulf that call our attention for their con­ tradictions between stated intentions to give women equality and the actual laws in the books. Women’s obedience, her lack of ability to act independently, her dependence on male members of the family with regard to the most important issues of a woman’s life like marriage, all clash with the goal of having a productive family whose members all contribute to the economic welfare of their homes and community. The various reform efforts launched by GCC govern­ ments show awareness of what could be their greatest challenge, that is, economic development and growth, yet still hold on to traditions and the same patriarchal family as before. Safeguarding the family is presented as the most important goal of Gulf governments, hence the realization that this very family is today facing its greatest challenges—due to the rise in divorce rates and the decline in rates of marriage—has been described as “ringing the bell” for these governments to take notice.

Challenges facing the family in the Arabian Peninsula today According to GCC official statistics, divorce rates witnessed a 55 percent increase during the period from 2010 to 2016, a figure that included expats; without expats, the figures for GCC nationals’ divorce rates showed an increase of 85.3 percent.38 What makes this increase even more alarming is the fact that it continues trends witnessed during past decades paralleling socio-economic and cultural changes impelled by modernization and government development plans. Thus, the GCC figures for the first decade of the twentyfirst century show that “the total divorce rate as a percentage of all marriages … reached 24 percent in Bahrain as of 2007, 25.6 percent in the UAE (2008), 34.8 percent in Qatar (2009) and 37.1 percent in Kuwait (2007).”39 In other words, the phenomenon was a general one touching on even the most stable of GCC communities like Qatar where eighty cases of divorce among citizens were registered monthly, showing a significant increase from a 4 percent divorce rate in 1989 to over 30 percent in 2009.40 The ratio of divorces to marriages also registered alarming figures with Kuwait registering the highest numbers of divorces at 1.8 cases for each 1,000 persons in 2016, with a ratio of 2.0 divorces for each 2.0 marriages. Other GCC countries were not far behind: Saudi Arabia meas­ ured 2.2 divorces for each 2.9 marriages; Bahrain measured 1.5 divorces for each 4.0 marriages; 89

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and Qatar 0.5 divorces for each 3.3 marriages. When the actual number of divorce and marriage contracts for GCC countries are compared, Saudi Arabia comes out on top with divorces with 70.6 percent marriages against 74.1 percent divorces; in other words, the divorce rates supersede the marriage rates. The same situation stands for Kuwait, at 6.6 percent marriages against 10.0 percent divorces in 2016. Where marriages supersede divorces, the numbers are still not reassuring: Emirates at 7.3 percent marriages versus 6.8 percent divorces; Bahrain at 3.1 percent marriages versus 2.4 percent divorces; and Qatar 1.7 percent marriages versus 1.6 percent divorces. Only Oman shows a relatively positive position for marriages transacted in 2016 at 10.7 percent marriages for 5.2 percent divorces.41 The reasons for this phenomenon are both similar and different from one country to another. Holding on to gender segregation is a central social feature common to all, if at differing degrees. While the Emirates and Bahrain are somewhat more open, allowing for co-mingling in public places and at work, Saudi Arabia forbids any type of mixing except between family members. One result of this is that prospective couples do not actually get to know each other until after a betrothal takes place, and only rarely do they have the opportunity for serious communication before they are married. Young people may hope for a love match, but that rarely takes place and instead “respect for parents and societal norms usually supersede personal preferences.”42 Many are opting for late marriage and it is common to attribute late marriage to the costs of the marital obligations, particularly the dowry and excessive demands of the bride’s family as well as the rising cost of living. Cultural factors also lead to divorce or to decisions to delay marriage.43 Mark Thompson finds that “many young men … argue that the culture surrounding arranged marriages is the largest factor ultimately exacerbating the growing problem of divorce.”44 After marriage, financial pressures leading up to marriage continue to plague the couple causing tensions and quarrels, and the lack of really knowing each other and finding themselves married to complete strangers, makes the situation even more difficult. This leads to a preference for not being married or a wish to end it after marriage. Personal Status Laws were drafted to hold on to an idealized family formed of a husband and wife or wives, with their children, living within a wider extended family whose life and economic interests are intertwined. Marriage between cousins was normative and is a tradition that continues until today. Living within a close-knit family system extended some protection to women from marital abuse; protecting a wife was a matter of pride and wife-beating was frowned upon. Little went on between a couple that could be held from other family members and women and their children enjoyed relative protection from arbitrary unilateral divorce and abandonment, unlike the modern family where women face insecurities which are not given enough attention to in the law. In abandonment, for example, the wife is left in limbo, neither married nor divorced; she is left to fall upon the charity of her parents if alive or other family members with whom she lives without receiving financial support for herself or her children from her husband, even though that is his duty by law. There are no clear numbers about abandoned wives today, but the issue has become serious enough to raise the concerns of authorities, who have called for steps to be taken in response.45 The recourse allowed for women by law in such cases is to sue for financial support or to sue for divorce based on abandonment and ask for nafaqa—financial support, estimated by the courts as an amount within a husband’s financial ability, which is paid for one year usually, but could continue for up to three years in specific cases. If there is a child, then she retains custody and the husband provides financial support for it. The social stigma associated with divorce and the financial beleaguerment that women face after divorce, as well as the excessive divorce costs, make it a less attractive evil for abandoned wives, especially since the amounts that would be received in a non-amicable divorce are usually much less than is actually 90

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due. One suggestion to provide “government funded homes for single Bahraini women, includ­ ing divorcees, widows and abandoned wives” was brought forward to the Shura Council in Bahrain.46 Interestingly, the proposal was opposed by a woman, who is a legal adviser to a housing bank because, she claimed that: “giving homes to the mentioned range of women will open the door for the use of those housing units for immoral practices.” She subsequently apologized, due to the angry responses her words caused. Part of her justification was that: “we are already giving Bahraini mothers married to expatriates homes since they have Bahraini children.”47 This incident tells much about how society in the GCC looks at single women, even if they are divorced or abandoned; living alone is not an acceptable alternative, notwithstanding how educated or professional a woman is. This does not mean that women do not live alone; it is quite common that expats hired to work in GCC countries live alone. There are also cases where women end up living alone through a lack of family or support, and are often being watched over by neighboring women, particularly when they are older.48 The incident also shows the feelings of nationals toward benefits given to foreign wives and the children of male nationals when the same benefits are not allowed for female nationals who are married to non­ citizens. This fact is one frequently complained about by the women of the GCC, not only because of the discriminatory practices but also because men are free to marry foreign women— they sometimes have to receive government permission, but are usually doing so at will. Women who do marry foreigners find that their children are denied the same rights as nationals, as illus­ trated by the example of almost 700,000 women in Saudi Arabia that hit the news in 2008.49 Men are also free to marry from outside their clan or wider family; as for women, they are expected to marry from within their family and can only marry outside of their family at the risk of social censure, unless the family into which they are to marry is of equal status or closely allied to her own. These rules narrow the marriage market and more women find themselves without prospects through no fault of their own. Holding on to traditions is only one concern with regard to keeping the family structure strong in the GCC; some of these countries actually face an imbalance in their population, with a high percentage of their citizens being non-nationals who are present in the Gulf due to work needs. With the growth in wealth due to oil and gas, accompanied by modernization and considerable business and infrastructural building, the numbers of expats have grown to super­ sede nationals, and as needs grow with the expansion of the economy, educational and cultural activities, the numbers of expats continue to expand. With the exception of Saudi Arabia, Oman, and Bahrain, all GCC countries face this dilemma and have taken steps in response. One important step has been to replace expats with a local workforce, by opening up the job markets to nationals, especially graduates of the modern schools and universities that have mushroomed all over the Gulf. Women in particular were targeted for this purpose; since they constitute about 50 percent of the population, it made sense that they would be the obvious replacement for expensive foreign labor. Clerical work of various types that could be undertaken by women is subjected to national employment when a national is available, as are professional and business jobs. It is at the lower level of the job scale, hard labor, building, shopkeeping, restaurant or domestic labor, that foreign labor is usual since nationals are not attracted to these jobs. Another plan followed by governments involves encouraging marriage and increasing fertility rates. Establishing charities to help the financial obligations related to marriage was one way followed by Qatar and other countries.50 Various methods are being used by the government as a response to the divorce rates and to protect the family and hold on to traditions; these methods include family counseling for couples, although much more is still needed as young Saudi men complained that “relatively 91

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little in the way of marriage counselling is available in Saudi Arabia.”51 As more information about family issues reached the media, it became a celebrated subject on talk shows and religious programs, where counseling by social workers, psychiatrists, and fuqahaʾ (religious scholars) became popular. On these programs, it is usual to blame women for both late marriage and for the high rates of divorce. Conservative religious preachers on radio and television programs actually advocate marrying daughters at a young age when they are most sought after. Using religious language and the words of the Prophet Muhammad, they advise fathers to accept a man who approaches them seeking a daughter in marriage as long as he has good morals and observes his religious duties. They speak against waiting for a rich man or a man of good family when a man of good morals is available. They address girls directly and advise them against waiting for “a knight of their dreams” who may or may not appear; they tell them that if they wait, their beauty and attractiveness will fade and they will find themselves left with nothing but regret. All the demands that they make when they are young, like particular housing, dowry, gifts, conditions in the marriage contract, and other matters girls and their families consider important, have no value when the girl becomes a spinster. At that time, when she has become older, she will be happy to bargain away all these demands that had once seemed so important. As for divorce and abandoned wives, the same programs continue to focus on the responsibility of the wife even though most callers to these programs are women who face problems with their spouses and are asking for advice. Preachers will counsel men to be fair among their two or more wives, but they do not preach against taking more than one wife. On the contrary, while touching on the need to treat wives equally, they actually advocate and talk in great religious, social, and psychological terms about the benefits of having more than one wife. In fact, they consider it as one important response to the crisis facing the family today; rather than women going on to become spinsters, becoming a second wife is advisable, even if it is against her hopes and vision of what her life would be like. It is better to be a second wife than not be a wife at all, is the advice repeated quite often, not only by religious preachers but also by a growing contingency of women who appear on radio and television to advocate for polygamy as both an answer to marrying women who have no husbands, and as a form of marriage of value in itself since it has God’s blessing. Divorced women and widows in particular are advised to accept becoming second wives since their marketability falls because they were previously married and particularly if they have children. Curiously, young women who host some of these television programs, while appearing quite liberal in their discussions of various issues, do not seem to dispute too much when it comes to polygamy as a solution for spinsterhood. While not attacking the idea, they also do not support it, which may tell us about the situation at present: women are in limbo as changes and transformations are happening and as an acceptance of the practicalities of the historical process as it is unfolding.  Besides abandonment, marital violence, cursing and beating of a wife and children, take primacy among subjects condemned by society, and are considered a chief reason for divorce. A study in Kuwait covering divorces for the first seven months of 2013 showed 4,036 cases of divorce against 10,262 contracted marriages. Most of the divorces were of the khulʿ form,52 which is initiated by women and is granted to her after a period of time during which the court exerts efforts to reconcile the couple and the wife gives up her right to alimony and other financial benefits. The fact that the majority were khulʿ means that it is the women who are opting out of the marriage, even at often a heavy cost. Violence is considered a chief reason for divorce, according to GCC officials. Saudi Arabia, which registered four khulʿ divorces per day in 2012 according to the Saudi Ministry of Justice, figures strongly here; in 2012, the number of divorces registered in Saudi Arabia was second only to Bahrain. Studies of Saudi marriages have shown that most married women in Saudi Arabia suffer physical violence at the hands of their husbands: 92

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“Registered cases of violence constituted 93%.”53 Family violence is not uniquely directed against wives and children, but the beating of daughters, sisters, and even mothers is quite common in the Arab world. In Saudi Arabia, estimates put the number of girls who ran away from home to escape violence at 1,400 in 2012.54 Given the interest in moving GCC society to a modern twenty-first century and at the same time trying to hold on to traditions by which women are kept within the fold of the family as the basic social unit, it is surprising that more is not done to end domestic violence. Given the numbers of women who are enrolled in educational institutions or who have graduated from them, others who hold chief positions in government, and still others who are business execu­ tives or doctors, engineers, and teachers, how can such women be expected to accept being physically assaulted or insulted by a male relative? While a woman is completely financially dependent on a husband, father, or brother, it may be that she is also more confined and less open to challenging them. But as women enter the job market, work, earn their own money, and become empowered through social and work interactions getting out of a violent domestic scene becomes the obvious answer. Critics of khulʿ law and blamers of women for family prob­ lems point this out and see women’s work and relative independence as being at the heart of the divorce crisis. In fact, Gulf society is divided among those who see women as the reason behind domestic violence, and others who see them as victims. When, in 2014, a man got out of his car and beat up his wife in public at a traffic light in a Saudi town, a dam can be said to have been broken. The media and social reaction to the event brought about a response from the govern­ ment in the form of setting a fine of from 5,000 SR up to 50,000 SR as punishment for unwar­ ranted wife beating. This was explained as providing protection to the Saudi family.55 Responses to the above decision by the Saudi government differed significantly, illustrating the dilemma that the family faces today in GCC countries. Lawyers’ websites cautioned at seeing this as a final decision on wife beating and warned that disciplining a wife by her husband is supported by the Shariʿa and accepted by law. However, they add, beating in itself is punish­ able by law, which makes any form of beating punishable by law.56 Other websites presented court cases showing that the Saudi government is serious about the application of these rules and explaining the court’s need to issue a punishment in cases of wife-beating. The wife would have to sue in court, which is very difficult to do, since it may bring about an actual end to the mar­ riage. She would have to present evidence of being abused and beaten significantly; the evid­ ence would need to be medically verified “by a medical report issued by a government hospital.” Presenting eyewitnesses to the court also helps, and the more severe the physical harm done to the wife, the greater the fine.57 In other words, the new Saudi regulations actually did no more than make the court enforce what religious regulations set out and that is disciplining a wife without physically harming her. In fact, religious programs on television not only talk about this but actually advocate it, as exemplified by the famous YouTube film of Sheikh al-ʿUrayfi talking about disciplining women as a duty similar to the training of camels and donkeys.58 While this is somewhat extreme, it is representative of patriarchal thought that continues to dominate among conservative elements of Arab societies. But even those considered relatively liberal among Muslim clergy condone the practice of wife beating and see that it is legitimate for a husband to discipline his wife. Thus, the Sheikh of al-Azhar, considered the most important contemporary authority on Islamic Sunni theology and the home of a famous school of theo­ logy, actually described disciplining the wife by her husband as a “cure prescribed by the Qurʾan” to reform and save the family. He said this even while Egypt faces 2.3 cases of divorce about every two minutes, making marriages and divorces almost equal in number, with domestic abuse being the number one reason for divorce.59 Following a public and international outcry at his words, the Sheikh explained his meaning by indicating that he was talking about symbolic 93

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beating for a disobedient wife as the “third solution after advising her and abandonment, and that it is for discipline and not for aggression.”60 The fact that things have changed, that women in a country like Egypt where majorities of those who went on demonstrations and changed governments were women, that over 35 percent of families are supported by single women,61 may mean that such solutions would not be acceptable notwithstanding what holy legitimacy is given to them. This, however, seems to have been lost on the religious class and patriarchal forces who continue to support the same discourse as the correct response for the family crisis. Without the historical process and social transformations working against the conservative dis­ course, the system and the laws and methods it uses are unable to adjust and establish new laws and rules which accommodate the changes in culture and social relations. Thus, the very family structure that they are aiming to protect is becoming beleaguered. It is no wonder then that the reactions to the efforts to control domestic abuse by Saudi authorities received little concern among Saudi males. Twitter postings reported by one article about wife beating and the new laws in Saudi Arabia show this. Some wrote that such a punish­ ment would only encourage women to push their husbands to beat them so they could receive compensation and spend the downfall they receive on frivolities: “How much did your dress cost? 50 thousand reals, if it is any of your business.” Others made fun of men who will become domesticated and obedient while wives ask them to beat them. Most telling, however, are the numbers who wrote advising men that rather than beating their wife it is better for them to use the 50,000 SR to get another wife and that this would be the best punishment for the wife.62 So taking another wife is understood to be a punishment and yet it is offered up as one way by which the divorce crisis facing the family can be addressed so that the marriage numbers would increase and unmarried women would find husbands. Thus, women find themselves facing various contradictions. Society expects them to marry and have children; their countries tell them this is their national duty. They expect to be well treated within a marriage founded on Shariʿa principles that base marriage on affection and companionship. They understand that obedience is expected of them and in return expect financial and emotional support from their husbands backed by their families and the govern­ ment. The constitutions and laws of their countries give them many guarantees as citizens and they receive much more than their sisters in other parts of the Arab world. Thus, education, health services, and even employment are made available to them and they are encouraged to work and participate in the country’s economy. Yet they find themselves in limbo, getting married is the goal, but one filled with uncertainties. Marriage is the way of life they conceive for themselves, but the threat of divorce or facing polygamy is a constant threat. As for work, the glass ceiling works against any significant advancement to higher positions except for rare and symbolic positions. A December 2018 business report, for example, found that “over 85% of GCC listed companies have no female board members.”63 In fact, labor laws act toward limiting the advancement of women by making the age of retirement for women fifty-five, while that for men is sixty. But it is the power given to the male by law, given to the husband vis-à-vis his wife and children, his expectations of their absolute obedience, and the right he is given to have their obedience that only leads to domestic abuse. Traditions also encourage this as families are alarmed by divorce of their daughters and work toward keeping her within a marriage, even if it is an abusive one. Women are told to accept men who offer them less, to become second or third wives, to enter Misyar marriages that have increased significantly in the Gulf, when they have become more dynamic, active, and mobile within modernizing environments. Once families lived in enclosed walled courtyard centered homes with parents,  grandparents, uncles and aunts, and all the children; today, such homes are being turned into museums. Cities of skyscrapers, upscale shopping centers, state-of-the-art 94

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airports, and multi-lane highways are today a normative part of GCC life. The culture has not been far behind, with fast food and social media competing for people’s interest with foreign travel. Most citizens of the GCC are today cosmopolitan, enjoying high standards of living, trying to hold on to their hawiyya through patriotism and its symbols, through observation of religious duties, and most importantly, by holding on to an ideal patriarchal family where women, no matter how transformed and productive, continue to be controlled by their male kin. To conclude, this chapter has tried to show the complexity of what is called the family crisis in the GCC today and the contradictions between trying to hold on to traditional laws and ways, while at the same time pushing for modernization and development that require women’s parti­ cipation in the work place. Women find themselves in a new world, one in which their public role is growing and as is their financial responsibilities. Most families in the Gulf today, like other families all over the world, depend on more than one source of income or salary. A family sup­ ported by both a father and a mother has become usual in much of the world including the Arab world; a family supported only by a single woman is today gaining ground and is globally calcu­ lated at 42 percent of all families; in the Arab world, the proportion of single mothers who are the providers is estimated to be 12.5 percent according to World Bank figures.64 These figures differ from one country to another, with Lebanon at 12 percent, Sudan at 22.6 percent; and Saudi Arabia at 28 percent, and the phenomenon is growing all over the Arab world.65 Yet, according to a 2017 UN study, about the Arab world, “Understanding Masculinities,” a majority of men interviewed in the four countries support mostly inequitable views when it comes to women’s roles. For example, two-thirds to more than three-quarters of men support the notion that a woman’s most important role is to care for the household.66 The study also found that men who were more liable to accept gender equality were children of educated and well-off parents. Given the high rates of university graduates and the young age of the populations in most GCC countries, the dynamics of change are at play and the future family and the culture surrounding it can only be transformed.

Notes 1 United Arab Emirates (UAE) Government, “Happiness,” Government.ae, https://government.ae/en/ about-the-uae/the-uae-government/government-of-future/happiness. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 “UAE Cabinet Approves National Charter for Happiness,” Gulf News, March 20, 2016, https://gulf news.com/uae/environment/uae-cabinet-approves-national-charter-for-happiness-1.1694177. 5 Peter N. Stearns, “The History of Happiness,” Harvard Business Review, January–February 2012, https://hbr.org/2012/01/the-history-of-happiness. 6 Rachel Shields, “The Secret of Happiness: Family, Friends and Your Environment,” Independent, August 15, 2010, www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/the-secret-of­ happiness-family-friends-and-your-environment-2053053.html. 7 Ibid. 8 United Arab Emirates (UAE) Government, “A Guide to Happiness & Wellbeing in the Workplace,” National Program for Happiness and Wellbeing, 2018, 76, www.hw.gov.ae/en/download/a-guide­ to-happiness-and-wellbeing-program-in-the-workplace-1. 9 Constitution of Qatar, “Article 21,” Government Communications Office, www.gco.gov.qa/wp­ content/uploads/2016/09/GCO-Constitution-English.pdf.

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Amira Sonbol 10 “Bahrain’s Constitution of 2002 with Amendments through 2017,” Constitute Project, 2012, www. constituteproject.org/constitution/Bahrain_2017.pdf?lang=en. 11 “United Arab Emirates’s Constitution of 1971 with Amendments through 2004,” Constitute Project, 2004, www.constituteproject.org/constitution/United_Arab_Emirates_2004.pdf. 12 “Saudi Arabia—Constitution,” The Saudi Network, 1992, www.the-saudi.net/saudi-arabia/saudi­ constitution.htm. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 “Oman’s Constitution of 1996 with Amendments through 2011,” Constitute Project, 2011, http:// extwprlegs1.fao.org/docs/pdf/oma128757E.pdf. 16 Ibid. 17 Emma Day, “Meet the Nine Female Ministers in the UAE’s Current Cabinet,” Emirates Woman, February 15, 2019, https://emirateswoman.com/meet-the-nine-female-ministers-in-the-uaes-current-cabinet. 18 “Labor Force Participation Rate,” The World Bank, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/sl.tlf.cact. fe.zs. 19 Lesley Walker, “Qatar Home to Highest Proportion of Employed Women in the Gulf,” Doha News, March 15, 2016, https://dohanews.co/qatar-home-to-highest-proportion-of-employed-women­ in-the-gulf. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 “Qatar Making Strides Towards Gender Equality,” Gulf Times, September 30, 2015, www.gulf-times. com/story/456931/Qatar-making-strides-towards-gender-equality. 23 “Gender Data Portal: Kuwait,” The World Bank, http://datatopics.worldbank.org/gender/country/ kuwait. 24 “12 Kuwaitis Among Forbes’ 100 Most Powerful Arab Women,” Kuwait Times, September 20, 2015, https://news.kuwaittimes.net/website/12-kuwaitis-among-forbes-100-most-powerful-arab-women. 25 “Gender Data Portal: Kuwait.” 26 “Saudi Arabia: Number of Women in Labor Force Rises to 20%,” Asharq Al-Awsat, December 24, 2018, https://aawsat.com/english/home/article/1517956/saudi-arabia-number-women-labor-force­ rises-20. 27 Mona S. AlMujanned, “Opinion: Saudi Women Entrepreneurs are Agents of Change,” STARTUP, February14,2019,www.arabianbusiness.com/startup/412833-opinion-saudi-women-entrepreneurs-are-agents­ of-change. 28 Ibid. 29 “Proportion of Seats Held by Women in National Parliaments,” The World Bank, https://data.world bank.org/indicator/sg.gen.parl.zs. 30 “Saudi Women to Start Own Businesses without Male Permission,” The Straits Times, February 18, 2018, www.straitstimes.com/world/middle-east/saudi-women-to-start-own-businesses-without-male­ permission. 31 “United Arab Emirates: Female Labor Force Participation,” TheGlobalEconomy.com, www.theglobal economy.com/United-Arab-Emirates/Female_labor_force_participation. 32 United Arab Emirates (UAE) Government, “UAE National Charter 2021,” Government.ae, www. government.ae/en/information-and-services/social-affairs/emirati-family. 33 United Arab Emirates (UAE), “Federal Law No. (28) of 2005 On Personal Status,” Legal Advice MiddleEast,November19,2005,https://legaladviceme.com/legislation/140/uae-federal-law-28-of-2005-on­ personal-status. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38  “ ʿIh.s.āʿāt al-zawāj wa al-t.alāq fī duwal majlis al-taʿāwun li-duwal al-khalīj al-ʿarabī 2016” [“Marriage and Divorce Statistics in GCC Countries in the Arabian Gulf 2016”], GCC-STAT Yearly Report no. 3, February 2019, https://gccstat.org/images/gccstat/docman/publications/marrige1.pdf. 39 Fatima Sidiya, “Divorce Rates Increase in GCC Countries,” Arab News, November 5, 2019, www. arabnews.com/node/359689. 40 Tofol Jassim Al-Nasr, “Gulf Council (GCC) Women and Misyar Marriage: Evolution and Progress in the Arabian Gulf,” Journal of International Women’s Studies 12, no. 3 (2011): 45.

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41 “ ʿIh.s. āʿāt al-zawāj wa al-t.alāq fī duwal majlis al-taʿāwun,” 15. 42 Mark Thompson, “The Growing Problem of Divorce for Young Saudi Men,” Gulf Affairs (Oxford Gulf & Arabian Peninsula Studies Forum, Spring 2018), 13, www.oxgaps.org/files/gulf_affairs_ spring_2018_full_issue.pdf. 43 “Marriage Rates Decrease, Divorce Increases by 32% in UAE,” MEMO: Middle East Monitor, March 29, 2018, www.middleeastmonitor.com/20180329-marriage-rates-decrease-divorce-increases-by-32in-uae. 44 Thompson, “The Growing Problem of Divorce for Young Saudi Men,” 13. 45 National Editorial, “Abandoned Wives Should Be Aware of Rights,” The National, January 19, 2014, www.thenational.ae/abandoned-wives-should-be-aware-of-rights-1.279697. 46 Sarah Townsend, “Bahrain Homes for Single Women ‘Will Lead to Immoral Practices,’ ” Arabian Business, April 6, 2017, www.arabianbusiness.com/bahrain-homes-for-single-women-will-lead-immoralpractices-588021.html. 47 Ibid. 48 “Emirati Woman Hailed for Looking After Elderly Living Alone in UAE,” Khaleej Times Abu Dhabi, November 25, 2018, www.khaleejtimes.com/nation/abu-dhabi/emirati-woman-hailed-for-lookingafter-elderly-living-alone-in-uae. 49 Nawal al-Rashid, “Suʿūdiyāt mutazawijāt min ajānib yabh.athna ʿan ‘hawiyya li-ʿabnā’ihin’ ” [“Saudis Married to Foreigners Seeking ‘Identity for Their Children’ ”], al-Riyadh, March 13, 2008, www.alriyadh.com/325455#. 50 Layachi Anser, “Divorce in the Arab Gulf Countries,” in Contemporary Issues in Family Studies: Global Perspectives on Partnerships, Parenting and Support in a Changing World, eds. Angela Abela and Janet Walker (London: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), 61. 51 Thompson, “The Growing Problem of Divorce for Young Saudi Men,” 14. 52 “Al-t.alāq yajtāh. duwal al-khalīj.. wa hādhihi hiya al-ʿasbāb” [“Divorce is Sweeping the Gulf States … and These are the Reasons”], Al-Arab, October 23, 2013, https://alarab.co.uk/.�����­����‫������­ھ�­�ھ��­����ﯿ�­���­ﯾ‬ ­����‫������­ھ�­�ھ��­����ﯿ�­���­ﯾ‬. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 “Al-Saʿudiyya: ʿuqūbat d.arb al-zawja 50 ʿalf riyāl” [“Saudi Arabia: 50,000 Riyals Punishment for Wife Beating”], Al Arabiya, April 15, 2014, www.alarabiya.net/ar/saudi-today/2014/04/15/�����­���­������­50­���­‫­﷼‬ �����­���­������­50­���­‫“ ;­﷼‬d.arb al-zawja yaqsim al-suʿūdiyyn.. d.id al-jarīma ʿam d.id al-ʿuqūba?” [“Wife Beating Divided the Saudis … Against the Crime or Against the Punishment?”], Al Hurra, May 24, 2014, www.alhurra.com/a/250305.html. 56 “d.arb al-rajul li-zawjatih min al-nāh.iya al-qānūniya wa al-ʿuqūba al-muqarrara” [“Wife Beating by Her Man from the Legal Perspective and the Prescribed Penalty”], Mohama.net, January 28, 2017, www.mohamah.net/law/���­�����­‫�������ﯿ�­�����ﯿ�­��­�����ﮫ‬. 57 “Khās. li-‘sayidatī’ al-ʿuqūba al-qānūniyya al-latī tantaz. ir man yad.rib zawjatah fī al-saʿūdiyya” [“Special for ‘Sayidaty’ The Legal Punishment that Awaits Whoever Beats his Wife in Saudi Arabia”], Sayidaty. net, April 26, 2018, www.sayidaty.net/node/713846/����­������/�����­����­������/���­���‫��­����­�������ﯿ�­�������­�����ﯿ‬ ­������/���­���‫����ﮫ­ﯾ���­��­�����­����­�������ﯿ�­�������­�����ﯿ‬#photo/1. 58 “Al-ʿUrayfī: ʿAn d.arb al-marʾa” [“al-ʿUrayfi: On Beating Women”], YouTube, January 30, 2016, www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9zgyRGzF0o. 59 “Sheikh Al-ʿAzhar: ‘d.arb al-zawj li-zawjatih lahu niz. ām wa h.udūd … wa hādhihi shurūt.uh’ ” [“Sheikh Al-ʿAzhar: ‘Wife Beating has a System and Limits … and These are its Conditions’ ”], Al Nahar, May 1, 2019, www.annahar.com/article/979283- �‫���ﮭ�­���­���­���­����­������­���­���ھ�­�ﯿ‬. 60 “Baʿd jadal h.awla ʿibāh.at d.arb al-zawja.. Shaykh al-ʿAzhar yuwad.ih.” [“After the Controversy on the Permissibility of Wife Beating … Sheikh Al-Azhar Clarifies”], Al Arabiya, June 2, 2019, www.alarabiya. net/ar/arab-and-world/egypt/2019/06/01/���­���­���­�����­���­������­�‫­ﯾ���­���ھ�­�ﯿ‬. 61 “Al-marʾa al-muʿīla.. z. āhira tatazāyad fī al-duwal al-ʿarabiyya” [“The Female Breadwinner.. a Rising Phenomenon in the Arabian Countries”], Masr Al-Arabiya, October 19, 2017, www.masralarabia. 1461595­­���� com/������­������/1461595 ������­������/1461595 ����� ���­­��‫­­­����ﯿ‬ ��‫�ھ��­­­����ﯿ‬ ��‫�����ﯿ�­�����­��­����ﯾ�­���ھ‬ ­�‫ �����ﯿ�­�����­��­����ﯾ‬. 62 “d.arb al-zawja yaqsim al-suʿūdiyyn.” 63 Michael Fahy, “Report: Over 85% of GCC Listed Companies Have No Female Board Members,” Business & Human rights Resource Centre, December 19, 2018, www.business-humanrights.org/en/ report-over-85-of-gcc-listed-companies-have-no-female-board-members.

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Amira Sonbol 64 Najwa Hashim, “Al-marʾa al-muʿīla ka-z. āhira” [“Breadwinning Women as a Phenomenon”], Muntada al-Marʿat al-Khalījiya, March 11, 2017, www.gwf-online.org/pens/5404/������­��‫���ھ��­����ﯿ‬. 65 “Al-marʾa al-maʿīla.. z.āhira tatazāyad fi-l-duwal al-‘arabīya.” 66 UN Women and Promundo-US, “Understanding Masculinities: Results from the International Men and Gender Equality Survey,” Executive Summary, 2017, 8, https://imagesmena.org/wp-content/ uploads/sites/5/2017/05/IMAGES-MENA-Executive-Summary-EN-16May2017-web.pdf.

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9 

Migrant UrbanisM in 

gUlf Cities 

a reality without vision?

Florian Wiedmann To a large extent, recent urbanization in the Gulf region has been shaped by the distinctive roles of local governance and extensive international migration. New models of governance, such as urban entrepreneurialism and various forms of public–private partnerships, are newly adopted approaches to face the conceived necessity to stimulate urban growth and to position Gulf cities within global markets. The unprecedented growth in small Gulf states, such as the UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain, has however been only possible due to the remaining regional wealth on fossil fuels and the problematic economic conditions in developing countries, particularly in South Asia.1 Gulf cities turned overnight into one of the worldwide largest building sites initiated by new visions to establish emerging hubs in global networks and put into reality by guest workers and foreign expertise. In this chapter, the terminology of urbanism is understood as Louis Wirth introduced it in 1938: 1) “a physical structure comprising a population base”; 2) “a system of social organization”; and 3) “a set of attitudes and ideas … engaging in typical forms of collective behaviour.”2 In cities with a migrant share of up to 90 percent of the overall population, a very distinctive form of urbanism can be observed.3 Short-term working contracts and an absolute majority of migrants being laborers, who have moved to Gulf cities without families, have created a rather unique urban society. The limited perspectives of most migrants to settle long-term have been limiting investments, which has had a major impact on local housing markets as well as services and entrepreneurialism in general. Many markets have emerged to serve a temporary urban population and their short-term stays rather than an increasingly consolidated and integrated urban society. The resulting challenges of this rather particular form of migrant urbanism are visible in an increasing lack of affordable housing and infrastructural deficits. During the early periods of modern urbanization, local governments mainly had to provide general infrastructure for a flourishing real estate market driven by the private sector, while they also regulated businesses and their responsibilities to provide housing and services to supply their foreign workforce. The increasing investment pressure in real estate markets led to liberalization and privatization, particularly during the early 2000s.4 Subsequently, Gulf cities have become dependent on continuous growth incentives to meet investment expectations. While extensive migration has enabled the construction of these new cities, increasing land prices and thus major development constraints have challenged the living conditions of most inhabitants. 99

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These accelerated growth rates were made possible by a new form of urban governance along the Gulf coast: city branding strategies in form of mega-projects, such as airports, events, and artificial islands led by newly initiated semi-public holdings.5 International and regional migration was inevitable to enable this growth-oriented development path and needed to be accommodated by supplying housing and services. While markets for upper income groups have witnessed a certain diversification, lower income groups have found themselves in an increasingly challenging environment between over-occupied dwellings and substandard services as in other parts of the developing world.6 The main challenge of any new form of governance is therefore an efficient and proactive mediation between future investment interests and the needs of majorities of urban populations. In this chapter, the extent of migration in the Gulf region is introduced first before the official development visions of Qatar, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai are compared by focusing on the conceived future role of migrants in Gulf cities. The chapter concludes with a discourse on the key challenges of the current realities of migrant urbanism.

Urbanization and migration in the Gulf Prior to discussing the contemporary visions of governance in the Gulf region, the overall context of recent urbanization tendencies should be introduced in more detail. To establish emerging service hubs, key strategies and investments were needed. Major ports and airports enabled a new level of regional and international connectivity and thus the establishment of main trading centers in a strategic geopolitical location in the Persian Gulf. While trade was accelerated by newly initiated free trade zones, offshore banking has been leading to a growing financial sector. During the 1990s, some rulers discovered the potential to provide new leisure opportunities in the region and to establish tourism as key economic driver for future diversification. In 1996, the Emirate of Dubai launched the Dubai Shopping Festival and the newly completed causeway between the Kingdom of Bahrain and Saudi Arabia led to a quick rise in tourism on the small island state during the mid-1990s.7 The beginning of the twenty-first century was marked by the liberalization of local real estate markets, which led to enhanced urban growth rates fueled by a new dimension of international migration. The local construction boom and the extending tourism sectors were furthermore enabled by the increasingly important role of airports and national airlines connecting the new hub cities worldwide. The particular form of market liberalization in Dubai, dominated by holdings, which are directly governed by key decision makers, became the model for all Gulf cities.8 However, the overall realization of these city projects would have not been possible during a period of less than three decades without the large-scale investments of oil and gas revenues. To remain in control and to mitigate the danger of entirely excluding nationals from the newly emerging economies, governments have applied various limitations for migrants to move freely on the local labor market.9 The dependence of each migrant to obtain an official sponsorship by a registered company or a national citizen has led to a fairly controlled migration. This restriction has always been seen as a necessary step to prevent an irreversible internationalization and the associated loss of cultural identity as well as to establish an important channel for nationals to become sponsors and thus to benefit from the overall growth. This sponsorship concept, known as kafala, has however led to the widespread preference to only hire migrants due to their limitations to switch employers and their comparatively low wages as well as their qualifications in certain areas.10 Thus, new nationalization strategies and policies were applied in most Gulf countries to enforce an increasing percentage of nationals being employed in the private sector. 100

Migrant urbanism in Gulf cities

The widely differing living standards, which are rooted in state subsidies and which can still be found in relatively high wages for national employees, led to some cases of nationals earning 600 percent of the equivalent foreigner’s salary.11 This extreme gap between nationals with high salary expectations on the one side and the competitive migrant community with differing expectations on the other has led to a socio-economic structure made up of a relatively controllable but frequently changing international workforce, with a share of the national population benefiting from new developments as sponsors, investors, or landlords. Many nationals have, however, been remaining dependent on state subsidies and nationalization policies. Most newly established economies from logistics, international trade, and tourism to financial sectors and higher education rely on qualified migrants, who have been witnessing hardly any progress regarding their longterm perspectives to settle permanently, while in parallel, facing increasing living costs due to the general loss of momentum of urban growth since the international financial crisis in 2008.12 Since the turn of the century, the overall population in all three small Gulf states—the UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain—has increased from only around 6 million inhabitants in 2005 to more than 13 million in 2017.13 Almost 70 percent of all inhabitants live in only five cities, including all three capital cities in addition to Dubai and Sharjah. The overall share of the national population along the Gulf coast has decreased from 27 percent in 2005 to around 18 percent in 2019. The lowest share with less than 10 percent can be found in Dubai, while the Kingdom of Bahrain enjoys the highest share with approximately 45 percent.14 The rapid migration caused the average population share of foreigners to increase to more than 80 percent in all major Gulf cities. For instance, during 2005 and 2019, more than 4 million migrants moved to the metropolitan areas of Doha, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi. A large share of these migrants has been staying in these cities for a limited number of years due to short-term contracts, which has led to high turnover rates. The most significant share of all migrants, up to 60 percent of the entire urban population, is South Asian, particularly from the Indian Subcontinent. Due to the fact that most of these migrants are low-income male laborers being engaged in construction sectors, logistics, and manufacturing industries, an average of almost 70 percent of the total urban population are men and the median age is 30 years.15 In all Gulf cities, laborers are highly dependent on their employers and they are not permitted to move into the countries with their families.16 Based on the evaluated statistics of all four cities, these laborers make up to about 40 percent of the cities’ urban population. The next lowest income group can be described as low to medium income, mainly from the Indian Subcontinent, the Philippines, and the MENA region. This group is engaged in service sectors, such as construction, trade, and tourism and includes many migrants and their families, who have settled in Gulf cities over several decades. Although medium-income groups with a minimum monthly wage (around $2,700 in Qatar and the UAE), they are usually permitted to move with their families; a large share has moved as singles due to short-term contracts and a Table 9.1 Overall demographic and growth profile in four Gulf states Country

Population (2005)

Population (2017)

Growth rate p.a. (max.)

National population

Migrant population

Male: Female

Median age

Qatar UAE Bahrain

836,924 4,106,427 867,014

2,324,346 9,505,870 1,412,416

17.74% 15.3% 8.1%

14% 11% 45%

86% 89% 55%

75:25 69:31 62:38

30.8 33.5 30.5

Source: Florian Wiedmann and Ashraf M. Salama, Building Migrant Cities in the Gulf: Urban Transformation in the Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019), 29.

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Florian Wiedmann

Figure 9.1 Construction workers on a building site in Doha. Source: Florian Wiedmann and Ashraf M. Salama, Building Migrant Cities in the Gulf: Urban Transformation in the Middle East (London: I.B. Tauris, 2019), 29.

large majority of young professionals.17 This migrant group accounts for another 30–40 percent of the urban population in each city. The remaining share of the urban population can be divided into two groups: the national population, who in all three selected Gulf cities constitutes only around 10–20 percent of the urban population; and the medium- to high-income expats, who make up around 10 percent. The medium- to high-income migrants are the most diverse group, including a large share of migrants from Western, Asian, and Middle Eastern countries. Based on similar historic and regional contexts, a very distinctive overall demographic structure can be detected in the case of Doha, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai, despite their different sizes and differing political leadership (see Figure 9.2).

The visions of future Gulf societies Recent visions for future social and economic structures were introduced by local governments to answer urgent questions regarding the overall development path of the small Gulf states. After a period of fast growth, key stakeholders as well as the general public needed to be convinced via comprehensive visions and development strategies regarding the future of Gulf societies. In the following section, the most recently published visions for Qatar, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai are introduced and discussed to identify the main characteristics of contemporary tendencies to guide future urbanization in Gulf cities. Qatar’s new political leadership, when Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani came to the throne in 1995, enabled a completely new path of development dynamics for what was once 102

Migrant urbanism in Gulf cities

City

Population structure

Western

Local

3%

Doha (population in 2018: 2,382,000)

Gender

Age structure

(male : female)

55< 0–24

5%

12%

25%

Middle Eastern

17%

75 : 25 56%

70 %

10 %

Indian Subcontinent

South­ east Asia

25–54

55